Each time I pack to go on vacation, I perform the important and painstaking task of choosing the music will accompany my trip. It doesn't matter how long the trip is or where it takes place; the music I have with me invariably becomes the soundtrack of my life for that period of time. It usually takes at least an hour to decide which small fraction of my collection will fulfill the needs of this elite status. And I'm not counting the additional time I spend thinking about how many pairs of socks to pack, all the while listening to CDs, considering them as various candidates and furthering the elimination process. I'm talking about an hour of concentrated time devoted to the sole purpose of making these choices.

My criteria are always specific to location, time frame, and purpose. For example, I'm going up to Santa Cruz and San Francisco this week. I'm going there for the purpose of admiring art, gazing at the coastlines, and considering placing my life and future there in a year or two. Before I engage in any sort of detailed deliberation about my vacation, I can safely say, without hesitation, that Manishevitz will come with me. Manishevitz makes music for watercolors and black and white photographs, for the calm ocean and the sunset, for careful consideration of the future, and for the fragility and mortality of human nature.

In essence, singer/songwriter Adam Busch is Manishevitz. He plays his lovely, plaintive acoustic guitar with fragile, melodic ease. He endearingly murmurs his slightly absurdist meditations on the usual philosophical fare with a brittle, shaky, unconventionally beautiful singing voice, not unlike that of Sam Prekop, or a dazed Stephen Malkmus. His songwriting ranges from melancholy, stripped-down folk to rich, upbeat pop, but his genuine mellow never subsides. On Rollover, his sophomore release, he employs a sizable cast of characters to assist him. Aside from his key rhythm section, many of the tracks feature full-on gorgeous, baroque arrangements (courtesy of famed Chicago sideman Fred Lonberg-Holm) with piano, cello, sax, flute and flugelhorn.

"Words for the Cause" begins Rollover with a bouncy pop tune recalling the orchestral aspects of Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys, sans the enthusiasm, pristine harmonies, and saccharine subject matter. Busch announces the heavy-handed yet exquisitely poetic intentions of his lyrical content within the first few seconds: "Words for the future are/ Words for repair/ Heavy eyelids, heavy hearts/ Lonely fists in the air."

"Black Hearts and Trombones" tones down the mood with softly finger-picked guitar and soothing brass and strings straight out of Jim O'Rourke's Eureka. His most gorgeous imagery on Rollover is generally aquatic in nature, and this song is no exception. He masterfully coalesces the all-too-human notions of futility and natural bliss with the verse, "I lost my pay check/ Swimming in the ocean/ We searched all night/ Dizzy on the beach/ Felt our property expanding/ Salt water digging at our feet."

Next, his cover of experimental NYC songwriter Rebecca Sharp's "Some Men" uses only a quietly rumbling ambient noise loop for rhythm underneath a couple of guitars and a cello. The lines may not be his, but they fit his aesthetic perfectly as he croons in the simple, wistful melody, "Some men build facades/ To hide their true motives/ With these words that we all know/ 'Peace, freedom, justice for all.'/ And their pockets are overflowing." The melody seems relatively joyous in contrast to the bitter cynicism of protests like "What an outrage that we tolerate this" and "How transparent," all delivered with resigned frustration.

"Cold Rubber Band" follows with a liveliness not heard since the record's opening track, this time featuring a honky-tonk piano and subdued electric guitar for its lyrical first half and a cyclical, soaring acoustic guitar for the second. Busch brings back the power of his watery metaphors: "Stepping blindly across the bridge/ It's water that makes up your body/ But the matter fell in, you fall in/ You fall in, you're falling out again." Finally, to fill out the substantial first half, "Reprise" enters with the baroque players interpreting the melody of "Some Men" in a brief, instrumental fugue.

The second half of Rollover is nearly as strong, following a similar pattern of sequencing. Busch explores darker territory here, however, as in "Go Blind," a single, repetitive, minor melody which sonically recalls the ultimately hopelessness of "the dead of winter" he sings about. And the closing number, "All Got to Go Sometime," takes the more effervescent, ragtime quality of "Cold Rubber Band" and grounds it closer to reality with ruminations of the inevitability of death, how the human condition approaches it, and advice on how to handle it. Busch's last lines once again contrast two very human feelings, that of hopelessness and of redemption: "You're stationary/ At the drop, the drop of a dime/ You're falling up, you're falling up."

This week, I'll be staying at two different motels, both near the edges of different bodies of water. I'll be walking through city streets and through forestry and on beaches. Rollover will undoubtedly help create the soundtrack to my trip and these simple experiences. It's vital and provocative, lyrically and musically, and it reveals itself further with each subsequent listen. It's already the soundtrack to the human experience, as intangibly surreal as it seems and as ultimately realistic as it gets. No, it's more than that. It's everything you've ever heard and nothing you've ever heard, at once. Just like each moment of life, which is everything you've ever experienced and nothing you've ever experienced, at once.

-Spencer Owen