Doug Powell

Doug Powell, who studied under Todd Rundgren, favors a more direct approach than his mentor and aligns instead with the style of XTC's Andy Partridge. Rundgren and Powell both endured early setbacks with record labels, yet the indie landscape of recent decades has allowed Powell to cultivate a following within America's power pop community, something far harder to achieve outside the majors during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Born in Oklahoma to a physicist father and a mother who performed professionally on flute, Powell developed an early admiration for XTC, Rundgren, and Jules Shear. At a Chicago solo performance by Shear, the young Oklahoman handed over a cassette containing twenty-two home recordings. Impressed, Shear circulated the material, oversaw a polished follow-up demo, and secured Powell a development contract at Elektra Records. The Elektra A&R executive who championed the songs later moved to RCA, where Powell cut his debut album, Ballad of the Tin Men. By the time the record was finished, however, that executive had joined Mercury Records; the label issued the album in 1996 only to see Powell's advocate dismissed by a new president, halting all promotion.

Powell had by then met and toured with Rundgren, who consented to produce the follow-up. After Mercury rejected the new demos and dropped the artist, Powell—now based in Nashville—placed one rejected track, "Torn," on the local-scene collection Nashpop: A Nashville Pop Compilation, issued by Colorado's Not Lame Records. The label subsequently released the full set of demos as 1998's Curiouser and commissioned an album of fresh material, More, in 2000.

Around the same period Powell joined college acquaintance Jerry Dale McFadden of Sixpence None the Richer, along with Wilco's Ken Coomer, the Mavericks' Robert Reynolds, and Cheap Trick's Tom Petersson, in forming the occasional collective Swag. The group delivered its only album, Catchall, in early 2001. Although Powell composed most of the material and sang the majority of leads, attention centered on the other members' primary bands. Swag disbanded while working on an unfinished second record. Powell issued the interim EP Venus DeMilo's Arms in 2001 and completed his most intricate solo effort to date, The Lost Chord, the following year.