When Shakey Graves released his fourth album, Movie of the Week, in September, that was just the start of how fans will be able to experience the musical journey the man whose given name is Alejandro Rose-Garcia has taken.

Part of that musical journey includes kicking off Sweetwater Performance Pavilion’s 2024 season on Thursday, May 9, with opening act Odie Leigh.

Create your own version of album

As part of Movie of the Week’s rollout, Graves launched a website giving fans access to the wealth of material that was recorded during sessions. Fans are essentially able to create their own alternate versions of the album.

“The big goal of all of this, too, is these sessions were so large, I’m doing this thing with the release where each song has probably five to eight different versions of it,” he said in a phone interview. “Then there’s all of this other stuff that’s not on there, whole other albums. 

“You’re going to be able to endlessly scramble the album into unique soundtracks, and then if you want, you can purchase them and we’ll send you the files and then you’ll have your soundtrack. We’re getting it to where it will have unique titles and everything.”

There will be other ways to interact with the material. 

“It’s like if you go to this thing and push a button, it will make you a soundtrack and a unique made-up movie for that day,” he said. “And it might organize it in a way that I could have never thought of. It might be the perfect record for whatever. 

“It’s going to be fun, too, just to get all of that music out. There’s so much stuff. I need to get it out!”

Imaginary movie

The Movie of the Week project was initially intended to be an actual film soundtrack. Some friends were making a movie and asked Graves to write the soundtrack. However, the director rejected some of the music.

Realizing he was excited by the music he had created, Graves began to formulate the idea of expanding on the material and turning it into something of a soundtrack to an imaginary movie.

“I wanted to go into the recording studio and try to make songs based on like a plot,” he said. “Like I had some melodies and demos and stuff.

“The plot of the movie we kind of thought of was like basically someone from the middle of nowhere kind of burns out, then looks on a map and kind of decides to go somewhere that sounds fancy. He chooses Century City. That’s the spot. Like everything’s going to be better in the future. And then it’s like a road trip movie. Then when he gets to Century City, he comes to find out it’s parking lots for other parking lots.”

Working with the same six-piece band he’s taken on tour to promote Movie of the Week, Graves recorded a wealth of material before he began to figure out which versions of songs would make up the album.

“The goal is never per se to go in and say, ‘Let’s make radio music’ or ‘Let’s make palatable music,’ ” Graves said. “But we went as hard and as strange as we could, and then right in the middle of that, it’s like let’s make sure that the message actually gets across, that the song is audible in a way that we like it and at least it doesn’t feel fully masturbatory, you know what I mean. 

Movie of the Week is a very approachable album musically, and it’s Graves’ most pop-leaning effort to date. Songs like “Evergreen,” “Century City,” “Limbo,” and “Lowlife” have rich melodies, a pleasing energy, and a lush, soft-around-the-edges sonic quality. Meanwhile, “Ready or Not” (a duet with Sierra Ferrell), “Play Where It Lies,” and “Playing Along” are among a few more spare songs that feel more intimate but also a bit edgier.

Evolving sound 

Taken together, Movie of the Week marks another distinctively different musical statement for an artist who has shapeshifted his music ever since he came on the national scene in 2012. 

After starting out pursuing acting — Graves had roles in Friday Night Lights and Spy Kids 3: Game Over — he shifted to music, although he does still do some acting, last showing up in 2021’s The Big Bend. 

His 2010 debut album Roll the Bones (which was re-released in 2021 with a bevy of unreleased material) was a stark, intimate, largely solo acoustic affair that quickly established Graves as a fresh voice on the folk scene. The album continues to attract new fans while holding sway as one of the best-selling albums on Bandcamp.

His next full-length release, 2014’s And the War Came, started to expand on Graves’ sound and stylistic range, adding drums and other instrumentation while retaining his spare ramshackle folk-based sound.

But 2018’s Can’t Wake Up truly upended expectations. A diverse full-band album, it still had vestiges of folk but overall was considerably rockier as a variety of synthetic and processed sonics played smartly off the rootsy foundations of the songs. While many of Graves’ fans treasure his spare solo-oriented music, Can’t Wake Up has gained devotees.

“I’ve met so many more recently that are like, ‘I just listen to Can’t Wake Up. Like I don’t really listen to your other stuff,’” Graves said. (I’m like) ‘What!?’ ”

So it makes sense that Graves plans to touch on all phases of his career in the concerts he’ll play as he tours extensively through the rest of the year. He’ll play solo during the show (a notable portion of his audience loves the one-man-band approach he took on his early tours, using a jiggered suitcase as a drum) and of course, with a band that he said is the best unit he’s had.

“Obviously, some of the more large, bombastic production stuff that I’ve made over the years has never sounded better,” Graves said of playing with his band. “But then also they’re fabulous musicians, so playing these old, more sensitive kind of home studio stuff, they’re able to do that, too. So we do a little bit of both.”

Fans can also expect Graves to be spontaneous and continue his tradition of rearranging and reinventing certain songs.

“I definitely do all of that in my solo areas, and then there are certain songs that are old enough to where, like just to keep our mood different or to suit the room, we’ll play certain things in a variety of ways,” he said. “But specifically, with a new album coming out, we recorded a lot of it live and didn’t build a lot of stuff. 

“We just learned how to play it, so the nice part is we’re really going to try to go for, you know, you want to at least start close to what it’s supposed to sound like.”