Photo by Doug Coombe

Genius.

Perhaps that word’s too liberally used in realms of culture reporting. Sometimes, maybe, it’s prematurely pinned on mere modest musical projects rolling out of local studios, week to week, tracked by those quirky yet affable artsy types who are likely your next door neighbor or your regular morning barista.

Still, when Fred Thomas comes up in conversation with the local musicians who’ve worked with him …that word has been dropped in more than a few times. And I twitch over typing it into a music article. Sounds cliché, right?

But something hooks you when you hear a Saturday Looks Good To Me song. You’re not sure what exactly or how he did it. Then, the next song you hear, you’re hooked just as securely into a pop sublimity, only in a different direction entirely. The secret’s in whatever Thomas’ is hearing in his head that particular day – some brilliant, meticulously crafted four-minute auditory idealization.

The true “genius” of Ypsi-native Fred Thomas is that no one can be upset if his band’s new album doesn’t live up to the last album. “One Kiss Ends It All” doesn’t sound like “Fill Up The Room” just as “Fill Up The Room” doesn’t sound like “All Your Summer Songs.” His signature as a songwriter/producer can’t be forged. If he’s into noise one day but into twee-leaning lo-fi acoustic pop the next, he’s going to follow all roads (even if it involves calypso-clutched brass boogies or found-sound-fx splashing water buckets in rusty laundry room sinks – at least that’s what it sounds like…).

“I’ve gotten really good at rolling with whatever happens,” the progenitor of local pop collective Saturday Looks Good To Me says. “That got instilled in me from the earliest days of basement shows where everything always broke and you had to improvise.”

“Everything still always breaks…”

“One Kiss Ends It All” comes out this month on Polyvinyl Records, and it’s the group’s first album in six years.

By “group,” we could mean Thomas. Or, at least, we’d like to just sum it down to “Thomas.” Just as we can’t trace Thomas’ specific pop style, we also can’t frame one specific Saturday “line-up.” “Kiss…” bares pop-music pen strokes from the likes of vocalist Betty Barnes and engineer Brook Davis and many more. Many more, still, have scheduled comparable Saturday sessions.

“So many of the people I’ve worked with over the years are so ridiculously creative,” says Thomas.

Beyond our clichéd narrative of pop-“genius” or musical mad scientist with his intricately layered compositional experiments, Saturday’s uncanny chemistry comes from the special musical scientists who’ve poured through its laboratory.

Saturday has been “so many different bands,” specifically in its live incarnations. “Playing music in Detroit in the late 90s and early 2000s was formative to the revolving-door kinda thing,” Thomas says. “A lot of the bands I knew had different people almost every tour.”

Thomas is known for being all over the map – different sounding songs with different performing groups. But the he nonchalantly shrugs un-categorical canon into perspective: “Working on music together becomes a really positive way to hang.”

Everyone collaborating on Saturday’s stuff has, at one time or another, “helped each other out with their own respective projects,” swapping them so that “it feels less one-sided.”

Thomas records works of other local bands out of his home studio. He also writes and records his own songs every week fueling a handful of distinct groups like the ambient-noise outfit City Center or the buoyant surf-punk quartet Swimsuit (or his own new-weird solo stuff). He also heads his own tape-centric, experimentally-inclined label called LifeLike.

The only sensationalism for “Kiss” shouldn’t be the genius-stuff or the comeback angle – the big to-dos merely in rewarding secrets and evocative acoustic dynamics sutured throughout these shimmering timbres, tumbling rhythms and boogie-able summertime pop ballads. Forget that “…it’s been six years.”

Because, “re-”is such a treacherous compound for bands in this situation. Is it a re-union? A re-start? A re-boot?

Saturday always exists, has existed and re-exists-again in some form or another. And it’s been able to shine in a post-millennial, internet-shuffled music world because true talent no longer requires a lot of big money to be “realized.”

“I mean, we can talk about the Illuminati if you really have a few hours to kill,” Thomas quips. “But, I’d rather talk about the new Saturday record.”

Carol Catherine, Autumn Wetli, Scott Deroche, Richie Wolhfiel, Justin Walter, Ryan Howard, Shelly Salant and “many many more” were among the instrumental players for this recording across “mostly nights and weekends, piece-meal style” in the very early Spring of 2012. This was a longer session than most Saturday studio stints with “more changes and refinements than we would have normally,” Thomas says.

His unconventional song crafting is “not nerve-wracking.”

“I just always accept whatever results come through and work to make the songs some combination of production and performances. (Producer Brook) Davis really pushed for tiny changes and minutia that I would have breezed past,” he says.

“And,” he says, “I’m hesitant to say anything is ‘realized’ to its ‘fullest potential,’ but this record does have more complex songwriting devices than most of our others. Everyone who worked on (“Kiss…”) was almost too solid [helping make] a thousand ideas come together as a single work.”

Saturday’s illusiveness extends, inevitably, to its live incarnations. When they are “live” (and by “they,” you know by now, we could mean any great number of unique, talented contributors), it’s “more about exploring songs in different ways. I enjoy the idea that anything you make becomes what it is based on how you present it to an audience.”

“People seem more excited about music now than they ever have,” says Thomas, whose anthropologic research of audiences and listenership is edified by nearly two decades of songwriting, recording and extensive-overall-band-living (national tours, countless concerts) as well as numerous years as a cultural clerk of myriad avant-garde / underground music from behind the counter at Encore Records.

His group’s coming back into a somewhat different music world though, further altered by the internet’s influence.

“There’s so much out there, and it’s all free – so you really have to be paying attention to know what you like and give it some value. It’s similar, if yet converse, to when I was growing up and getting into music back in the 90s. Then, there was no access to anything, so you had to search out things you could relate to and love,” he says.

This reflects Thomas’ appreciation for his audiences who still show up – even after six years. “People seeking things out customize their music findings to their lives. People who want to be at Saturday shows really want to be there and are super excited. They’re not just showing up because they read about it or there’s nothing else to do. There’s plenty else to do.”

“One Kiss,” (similar to Saturday’s “core,”) is a collage – 11 four minute pop songs documenting a studio-set experiment of “cobbling together various free-flying elements into a unified whole. [“Kiss”] is deeply collaged. It wasn’t until the entire thing came together in the final editing phases that the vision I’d had all along became clear.”

Thomas surmises, “It’s a little different from anything we’ve done before.”

It wouldn’t be Saturday Looks Good To Me if it wasn’t.

Saturday Looks Good to Me will perform at 9 p.m. on Saturday, May 25 at the Loving Touch in Ferndale. So, if that Saturday looks good to you, mark your calendars! (Sorry – couldn’t resist.)