Moody Blues

Get Matthew Perryman Jones talking about his two most recent albums, and you notice that the word "emotional" surfaces often, like some anthemic chorus. But he's no emo kid. Jones is a thirtysomething singer and songwriter who had his first child while recording his new album, Swallow the Sea (a lullaby, "A Song for Canaan," bears his new daughter's name) and whose artistic vision involves both deep-feeling, impressionistic songs and concern for the family legacy.

"A lot of people were asking me does [having a baby] make you want to do more commercial-type stuff," he says. "I guess my answer was and still is, 'If that means compromising something artistically, no it doesn't make me want to do that.' Yes, I want to make a living and I want to be able to help provide for my family, but I also feel like I want my child to grow up and be proud of what her father is doing."

Not that the music Jones makes—integrity intact—is unapproachable at all. If it were, his song "Save You" would never have snagged the choice closing spot during the season finale of Kyle XY, and also appeared on Private Practice. Besides getting his songs on TV—including tracks from 2006's Throwing Punches in the Dark—he's been a frequent and visible presence in happenings among the cream of Nashville's young-ish pop songwriting crop, like the just-completed Ten out of Tenn tour.

Jones' current sound is worlds away from the more folk-based, confessional fare of his first two albums, Nowhere Else but Here and For the Road. "I was pretty young when I wrote a lot of those songs," he says. "It was really personal, kind of memoir-ish—if you can have something that's memoir-ish at 25." But that approach didn't satisfy him. "I decided I really just want to make music that reflects the kind of music that I love," he says. (And if "Save You" is an indication, what he loves may start out quiet, but it soon catches a gust of pathos.) "I didn't want to get stuck in the 'guy with a guitar' singer-songwriter thing."

After those two albums, Jones spent a few years as a musical hermit, not really playing shows, while he loosened up his lyric-writing, listened to Britpop band Travis a lot and built melodic muscle. "I felt like if you're thinking too much about what you're saying, you can impose ideals on a song that don't belong there, whereas an emotion just needs to be conveyed somehow and there are certain words or certain sounds that go along with that," he says. "And you should just follow your gut."

Jones completed his metamorphosis with songwriter and producer Neilson Hubbard, who—serving as the minimalist yin to Jones' more dramatic yang—produced Swallow and Throwing Punches, and co-wrote songs for each.

"I like it really big and grandiose in a lot of ways, and [Neilson] is quite the opposite a lot of times," Jones says. "He is the king of subtlety and wanting to strip things down quite a bit and having a lot of space. So I felt like there was a balance that was struck there."

As a result, both of Jones' most recent albums are big and moody-sounding, and often driving and cathartic too. He even sings differently than he used to, with shimmering swells of guitar and keyboard to give his tenor ample skyward momentum.

On Swallow, the mood has taken a slightly more desperate turn. The album's emotional centerpiece—in a decidedly non-emo way—is Jones' blistering, wrenching arrangement of the traditional spiritual "Motherless Child." He and Hubbard set the tone with a half-minute of agonized, netherworldly moans, channeling a musical scene from the 1939 film Way Down South (copyright hairiness kept them from sampling it outright). At one time, they thought about making it its own longer track. Says Jones, "I loved it, but we had other people listen to it and they're like, 'That's too much to ask.' "

And knowing when to exercise restraint is itself a kind of maturity.