Taking a lead from the great names of music

A singer/songwriter described as having the heart of Van Morrison and the head of Brian Wilson will line up at Birmingham's Glee Club tonight.

Matthew E White will play songs from Big Inner, which pays tribute to such artists as Washington Phillips, Allen Toussaint, Jorge Ben, Jimmy Cliff, and Randy Newman.

He has been described as 'A genuinely great artist' by The Guardian, while his record was called 'A genuine classic. Hugely impressive' by The Independent. Mojo described it as being 'A debut album of psychedelic gospel-tinged gems', while GQ said: 'Bathe in the redemptive charm of an orchestrally dense paean to the seventies. . . somewhere between Nick Drake and Cat Stevens'.

Cameron Ralston, the bassist who is one of White's closest and longest-serving collaborators, acknowledges the band's debt to great artists.

"We talk referentially a lot when we're working out music. We always come back to the greats: Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Jorge Ben, Duke Ellington, Otis Redding, early Bob Marley – the big figures that we all adore. Those are the ones we reference, not the little indie band that nobody's heard of. We like the stuff that's time-tested and keeps getting greater: it gives you a very tall top of the mountain to be climbing towards."

White hails from the American coastal town of Virginia Beach and was bought up in a religious environment.

"My brother-in-law is a pastor, my brother is a Christian writer and professor, my dad runs a mission, my mom helps my dad run the mission. It's troublesome how the beautiful, unique part of what the Christian faith can be gets co-opted by a political agenda. I've been close to a Christian environment that's been really good to me, and I appreciate a lot that it brings, but I also see how unhealthy parts of it are. There's a little bit of me reaching across the two versions of America and saying, Hey, I'm a rock 'n' roll musician.

"I'm around the most liberal people on the planet. I get this world. People have a lot of love in their hearts and a lot of desire for things to get better. And I'm also around a lot of incredibly conservative Christians and that world: Southern, politically conservative, economically conservative. It's the same thing there."

White was pleased with Big Inner, but believes 'art is never finished, it only stops in interesting places'.

"If you're going to release something you have to be pragmatic," he says, "you're going to want it to stop in the most interesting place. But with dub music, you take a track, turn it around and look at it a different way, and I think the Spacebomb process really lends itself to that. I'd like to make a dub version of Big Inner."

Tickets are available at the venue.