One of the greatest gifts music offers is the chance to escape, to get lost in a story, in a song. It’s what the music of Feathermerchants is all about, what it’s rooted in—the opportunity to slip away, if only for three or four minutes at a time. “I need an otherworldliness to music, an ambience,” says guitarist/vocalist Pete Veru, who founded the band in the late ’90s, and writes most of its songs. “I think music is a transcendental thing; I’m looking for music that’s takes me out of where I am right now and puts me into an entirely different place.”

But what makes the band unique is its balance of the ethereal and the traditional. With the alluring, voice and songwriting talents of singer Shannon Kennedy, Veru, guitarist Jim Chapdelaine, drummer Jon Peckman and bassist Jay Wiggin meld pop with avant guitar sounds, recalling the atmospherics threaded through the important music of the 4AD label and the beloved, missed songs of the Sundays.

Rooted in everything from Patty Griffin and Red House Painters to Pink Floyd and Seven Percent Solution, the band’s Last Man on Earth offers up ten such opportunities for escapism, cinematic songs inspired by cheating wives, ex-lovers and former cult members and studying everything from loves lost to the boundless imagination of a child. It feels like the heyday of alternative rock, like the arty, sophisticated but deeply soulful music coming out of the U.K. in the late-‘80s. It’s appropriate then that the disc includes a lovely cover of The Church’s signature song, “Under the Milky Way.”

It’s modern folk music, or gentle alternative rock music, emotional headphone music laced with affecting Kennedy/Veru harmonizing, the spare, lo-fi jazz vocal and the occasional frayed, razor-edged, spiraling guitar.

Last Man on Earth marks the latest chapter in a story that proves it’s never too late to start over. The seed for Feathermerchants was planted some 14 years ago, when Veru began taking guitar lessons at the age of 29. He dove headfirst into learning the soundscapes of Waters and Gilmour and the Eastern rhythms of Dead Can Dance. Soon he took stab at creating some music of his own and, 15 years into a career on Wall Street, started thinking about leaving behind his white-collared life to devote himself full-time to music. (He would eventually do so in 2001.)

Through an old college roommate, he met Hartford, CT-based producer Chapdelaine (Phoebe Snow, Clarence Clemmons), an Emmy-winning composer/producer (PBS’ The Making Of Amistad) and brilliant guitarist/multi-instrumentalist, forming what has remained the core of the band, after the recruitment of Chapdelaine’s friend and collaborator Peckman. Vocalists Alison Winston and Erin O’Hara and bassist Drew Glackin rounded out the band’s original line-up, which scored an immediate boon when a song from their initial demos was used in the 1998 indie film Above Freezing, featuring Mike O’Malley, as well as a cameo from Veru himself, who played a gangster.

Self-released the following year, the band’s eponymous debut found chief songwriter Veru’s imagination running wild, as well as guest turns from the Tragically Hip’s John Fay and lauded Moroccan vocalist Hassan Hakmoun. “It was purely instinctive songwriting from a novice, and to be honest with you, that’s what makes the record good, I think; it has no preconceived notions in it, nothing’s overthought,” says Veru. The disc earned high praise from the likes of CMJ and airplay on over 300 college and 40 noncommercial stations, as well as enjoying an unprecedented three-month stay at No. 1 in New York City on the Amazon.com Indie Music Chart.

Parting ways with Winston and O’Hara (both of whom left to have children), Veru spent the better part of a year looking for a new voice for Feathermerchants, due in part to the post-9/11 mood in Manhattan: “I ran an ad in the Village Voice on Sept. 10, 2001,” he says. “After 9/11, nobody wanted to talk about being in a band at that time. People were taking a lot of personal inventory.” After auditioning 150 singers, in July 2002 he found Kennedy, who had recently left the popular Philly-based band Seven Potato Baby and moved to New York.

“At the time, I thought she had a beautiful, spectacular voice, and I still do,” Veru says. “She’s a great singer, but also she’s just a great person to be around: People like her. They don’t just like her voice, they like her. She’s great to write for and with.”

Bringing to Feathermerchants a love for the likes of Low and Mojave 3, the band’s sound quickly began to evolve. “We don’t qualify as a folk band, but some people think we are. We don’t qualify as a rock band, but some people think we are,” laughs Veru. The band’s sophomore disc, 2003’s Unarmed Against the Dark, followed and featured new bassist Paul Ossola, a regular with G.E. Smith’s Saturday Night Live Orchestra. Issued (like each Feathermerchants disc) on the band’s Innocent 12th Street Records, the album featured acclaimed keyboardist Chuck Leavell (Rolling Stones, Clapton, Allman Bros.) on two tracks, and a cover of the Psychedlic Furs’ “Heartbreak Beat.” The album was, as Veru puts it, a “return to Earth,” and became a runaway hit in South Africa—of all places. It was followed by the remix EP Street Theater in 2004.

With Last Man on Earth, the escapism continues, say Veru. “It’s back to outer space and more. It’s more eclectic. There’s more ambience and denseness, and spacially it’s much more interesting, much bigger. It’s just gotten a lot weirder.”