Update: Danny James has canceled his upcoming show in West Marin on Feb. 17 due to family emergency. Danny Vitali and DJ Sam Swig will still perform.

Born and raised in Oakland, musician and songwriter Danny James has always gone about making old-school music that pushes modern-day boundaries.

From his proto-punk origins to his current ’70s-inspired glam-rock project, James’ voice stands out in the crowded Bay Area scene for his explosive musical presence and energetic arrangement of psychedelic-pop pastiches.

James first turned heads locally in the late 1990s with garage punk band the Cuts. Through a string of well-received albums, the Cuts dialed the clock back to the heyday of acts like the Stooges, erupting onstage with hard-worn angst.

After the Cuts disbanded in 2006, James spent several years looking to reinvent his sound, and ultimately landed back in the past with an R&B and funk aesthetic inspired by Bay Area icons like Sly and the Family Stone.

In 2013, James released his debut album, PEAR, under his own name as a cassette on Burger Records. Recently reissued, PEAR is an epically brazen master class in the last 50 years of rock ‘n’ roll. Some songs soar with psyche-rock acidity, some strut with synthesized electro-pop wizardry and others seem to spin like a disco ball, illuminating the unending dance party that goes on in James’ head.

The blues saved the Rev. Shawn Amos. Before he became “the Reverend,” the Los Angeles–based Amos was an Americana folk artist, but he walked away from the microphone for nearly a decade after releasing a gut-wrenching tribute to his mother, titled Thank you Shirl-ee May, in 2005.

“It was a brutal album to make. It was me publicly grieving in real time,” says Amos, whose mother committed suicide in 2003. “It took it out of me, so I stopped making music.”

In 2013, he returned to the stage with a new outlook as the Rev. Shawn Amos and started playing a blend of stripped-down blues, rock, roots and soul.

“‘The Reverend’ was born out of me rediscovering the blues and rediscovering playing that music,” Amos says. “I didn’t really think of performing music as something that could be joyful, cathartic or entertaining, and the blues introduced me to the idea of that.”

This month, Amos releases his new album, The Reverend Shawn Amos Breaks It Down, which was inspired by politics as much as personal changes in his life throughout the last year. “This wasn’t the album I was intending to make,” he says.

Rather than the Chicago-style blues of his previous two albums, the new record is connected to Civil Rights–era songs that Amos brings into the modern era.

“The album is about 21st-century freedom songs, music that’s meant to bring us together and remind us about our humanity,” Amos says. “That’s why I love the music of the ’60s and ’70s: it was used primarily to provide sustenance when times are hard and remind us of what we have to gain when we come together.”

The Reverend Shawn Amos Breaks It Down includes seven original songs and three inspired covers, and centers on the three-track “Freedom Suite.” The suite comprises a stirring a cappella version of the traditional “Uncle Tom’s Prayer,” the introspectively groovy “Does My Life Matter,” that gives educator and author Booker T. Washington co-writing credit, and the Gospel-choir led “(We’ve Got to) Come Together.”

While Amos didn’t exactly
plan on the album coming out the same day he plays Petaluma, he’s happy to unveil these songs in the North Bay.

“I love Northern California, and Petaluma in particular,” Amos says. “I hope people come ready to dance, hold hands, celebrate, and get some strength to keep fighting.”