Enter the Reluctant Troubadour

It’s usually easy to pick out the leader of a band in a photo or in a backstage dressing room. There’s something about the body language or the confident gaze that tells you this is someone who is used to lots of attention.

But in almost any setting, you’d be hard-pressed to identify Jason Lytle as the guiding force behind Grandaddy, one of the most enthralling new American rock bands.

Even on stage during an afternoon sound check at the Wiltern Theatre, Lytle stands unceremoniously behind a battery of instruments, wearing a sweater and cap that look as if they were picked from a lumberjack catalog. When he starts singing in a pinched, high-pitched style reminiscent of Neil Young, he’s motionless, as if trying not to draw attention to himself.

Lytle, 31, is equally withdrawn during an interview. Backstage before the Wiltern concert, he gazes straight ahead, avoiding eye contact and speaking just above a whisper. It’s easy to understand why he enjoys going home to Modesto, where he spends hours riding his bicycle or driving his truck on the back roads.

“You know, my mom is pretty much of a recluse,” he says. “She’s very thoughtful, very intelligent. She just doesn’t like being around people. She lives out in the high plains desert of Nevada. I haven’t gone that far, but I know I have some issues to work on.

“I’ve been in enough social situations where I enjoyed the people around me, and I know the benefit of that synergy that can happen when you are among other positive people. I like that and I want that, but I don’t know. . . .”

Lytle’s music with Grandaddy also has a reclusive, understated surface, but there’s nothing timid about it. “The Sophtware Slump,” the quintet’s major-label debut, is a strong-willed work that bristles with the kind of burning artistry and passion that is all too rare in today’s unchallenging pop-rock scene.

The album is layered with gentle, dreamlike musical settings that have been compared to those of such artful groups as Pink Floyd and Radiohead. What makes it so compelling is the balance between that calm detachment and the sometimes biting themes of human vanity and indulgence.

In such songs as “Broken Household Appliance National Forest” and “The Crystal Lake,” he suggests that the speed and power of technology are only magnifying human misadventures, making the latest inventions obsolete more quickly than ever. In “Broken Household,” he speaks of a time when “[m]eadows resemble showroom floors / And owls fly out of oven doors.”

England’s New Musical Express, which gave the album nine points out of a possible 10, declared that the songs offer a “picture of the place where the dreams of the last century have gone to die. It’s about getting lost in the glare of the computer screen, and finding your way home again.”

Despite the group’s steady touring and a smattering of strong reviews, especially in Europe, the Grandaddy album has only sold about 125,000 worldwide, including just 25,000 in this country since its release in June. It has received virtually no radio airplay, which is the most important factor in breaking a new band.

But the group’s record company, V2, isn’t giving up. One of the label’s other commercial longshots, dance-music wonder Moby, broke through to mass acceptance this year, and V2 is hoping lightning will strike twice. The label will keep promoting the group in the new year and will try to get some of the music into films, which is one strategy that worked well with Moby.

“Jason is a special talent,” said Kate Hyman, the V2 artists and repertoire executive who signed both Grandaddy and Moby. “I think he’ll eventually find an audience. When people hear the music, they buy the album. We’ve seen that happen in city after city after the band plays. We’ve just got to get more people to hear it.”

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Lytle cups his ears as he explains his introduction to music as a youngster in Modesto. He’s sitting backstage at the Wiltern, a few hours before the band opens for Elliott Smith on a high-profile tour co-sponsored by Rolling Stone.

“We had the turntable in the living room so you had to wear headphones to hear the music over the television,” he says. “That made you conscious of every sound, and I became intrigued with the way all the instruments sounded. I was probably 5 when I first heard [the Beatles’] ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and it was like being transported. It was so melancholy and sad.”

Twenty-six years after that introduction, Lytle is making his own music, and its delicate, heartfelt, often melancholy edges are both refreshing and inspiring at a time when rock’s dominant tones are aggression and rage.

Besides such conventional rock instruments as guitars and drums, Lytle employs in his soundscapes all sorts of odd textures, from birdcalls to caressing waves, in ways that seem tailor-made for the intimacy and concentration of headphones.

In parts of the album, he’s a social commentator--lamenting the way the pace of life in the computer age causes people to lose track of basic human values.

“I have a big problem with people who are just brash and thoughtless,” he says. “I’m a big fan of treading lightly and being respectful, but it seems that everywhere I go, I seem to run into this whole gluttony thing.

“There is all this planned obsolescence, and the computer age seems to have made it worse. The gap is getting smaller and smaller in terms of how long something is supposed to last, and I think that affects our attitudes about everything. The pace of life is so fast there’s no time to be civil.”

But elsewhere in the album, there’s a confessional, introspective tone as he shares some deeply rooted anxieties. In “So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky,” the closing number, he imagines a time when he can “fly away, far from pain.”

“I feel like I spend so much time trying to just get away, trying to find the bliss of sleep and escape,” he says. “Music is one way I find that comfort. That’s why I work so hard on it. I’ll mess with a line for a week sometimes, just to get the words to flow.”

Lytle shows that same dedication when it comes to live shows. He spends an hour at the Wiltern sound check, making sure that all the instruments are properly balanced. That’s 15 minutes longer than the show itself.

“When I first met him, I thought there was a layer of skin missing,” says V2 Records’ Hyman. “He’s so sensitive, which is where a lot of the music’s sweet, human touch comes from. But he’s also quite tough when it comes to his music. He reminds me of Brian Wilson back in the days of the Beach Boys. He too was sensitive, but he was a perfectionist when it came to his music. That’s the same with Jason. He won’t compromise his art.”

Lytle is no newcomer to the role of outsider. Raised by his father after his parents divorced when he was 5, he never seemed to fit in at school. He started drinking at an early age and went to four high schools because of behavior problems. He once spent 17 days in juvenile hall for breaking into a skateboard shop.

Even more than music, skateboarding was Lytle’s passion as a teenager, and he got so good at it that he traveled around California entering competitions. After high school, he moved to Southern California because there was more opportunity to compete.

But that career ended when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. He was 19, back in Modesto working at various odd jobs. That’s when he rekindled his interest in music. He used all his spare money to buy old instruments and recording equipment. “I was addicted to the adrenaline and the creative outlet of skateboarding, and all of a sudden it was gone,” he says. “And I had to find some place to put all that energy, and music seemed the right place.”

After writing and recording on his own, Lytle formed Grandaddy in 1992 with bassist Kevin Garcia and drummer Aaron Burtch. V2’s Hyman became aware of the group a year later through a tape passed along by members of the band Giant Sand. She was operating a small publishing company in New York, and was so intrigued by Lytle’s music that she flew to Modesto and spent two days trying to persuade him to sign with her company.

“He was very independent, very cautious of getting involved with anything large or corporate,” she says. “I think the fact that I ran my own company out of a loft made him feel safe.”

When Hyman joined V2 Records in 1997, Grandaddy was her first signing. By that time, the group had added guitarist Jim Fairchild and keyboardist Tim Dryden, and it had released an album, “Under the Western Freeway,” on tiny Will Records of San Francisco. (V2 has since re-released that album.)

There were promising moments in that first album, but “Sophtware Slump” is a creative coming of age.

Lytle, who lives alone, says he’s still adjusting to life on the road.

“I think I’m kinda in my Kris Kristofferson stage now . . . the sorta whatever-gets-you-through-the-night thing,” he says. “I’m still not comfortable standing on stage and being looked at, so I’ll have a few drinks to sort of cloud over that.

“I think sometimes of just being like [the late English cult figure] Nick Drake and just sit somewhere by myself and sing pretty little songs. I love being outdoors and I love silence and fresh air, and it seems like everything we are doing [in the music business] is the complete opposite. But then I’ll write something that you want to share with people, so it’s just something I have to wrestle with.”