Made in Britton

It's been seven years since Timothy Monger released an album under his name. What he needed was to catch his breath. What he needed was something like a "kick-start."

The Ann Arbor-born singer-songwriter known for his balance of folk and baroque pop, capped off his spring by running a marathon (yes, a marathon) along the foggy coast of the North Sea in Scotland only to jump start his summer by busking a marathon of acoustic performances, serenading nine record stores and coffee shops throughout Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti in less than 12 hours.

And at the finish line, he released his second solo LP, The New Britton Sound. Named for the farming community where he and girlfriend Kristie Brablec have lived for the last five years, this new album digs into comparatively darker territory, lyrically and tonally, than the simmering sunbeams of its predecessor, 2004's Summer Cherry Ghost. This is understandable, since his band, the yarn-spinning folk-rock quintet the Great Lakes Myth Society, reared down to an official hiatus in the middle of Britton's production.

"It's been a tough couple of years," Monger says of GLMS's inactivity. "We'd never really taken a break. We'd had a lot of success, critically, and respect from other musicians, but we'd made our mistakes. Maybe we didn't tour at the right times or kept to gigs that were the wrong gigs at times, but we'd also done a lot of cool things. We were demoing our third record but it just wasn't gelling.

"Personally, it was tough."

Monger had been performing with GLMS members such as his brother, James, and Gregory McIntosh for more than a dozen years and they're guys Monger calls his "best friends."

The songwriter — who lists both Bowie's Hunky Dory and Queen's A Night at the Opera in his top five list of life-changing albums — is certainly one of Michigan's more prominent and visible folk-rock sons. To make Britton, Monger embraced a bit of hermitage and set up his ProTools studio inside a feed house on Brablec's family farm. He mostly produced the album himself, occasionally inviting a slew of Ann Arbor- and Ypsi-area musicians to Britton (25 miles south of Ann Arbor down US-23) to hunker down with him for some snowed-in song crafting.

So why'd it take seven years to do a solo follow-up to Cherry? It was a combination of self-doubt masquerading as self-deprecation ("I know the world wasn't really waiting for a second solo album from Timothy Monger"), the wear of a whirlwind five years spent recording and touring with GLMS, and, particularly, the financial hit Cherry delivered to his wallet.

But much has changed in the seven years since Cherry, particularly the Internet's shaping of the "music biz." Monger reluctantly started a drive on the project fundraising site kickstarter.com, and wound up reaching Britton's goal for production costs within 24 hours from fan and friend donations.

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