Cary Brothers: These are the breaks

It’s Tuesday, one of the biggest days in Cary Brothers’ life, the day his album “Who You Are” is released, and the singer-songwriter is talking about good fortune. “I hope my karma is saving itself for the record,” he jokes from his home in L.A., where he is laid up. “I cracked my ankle doing the video shoot, then I lost the hard drive on the laptop that does everything for me.”

By the time he hobbles into the Hotel Cafe tonight for his record-release show, Brothers figures to have some stories to tell, beyond those on his lushly orchestrated debut. There, amid ringing guitars, crashing cymbals and tinkling pianos, the Nashville native with the Britpop sensibilities tells his L.A. tales, touching on “a lot of things that have happened to me since I moved here, all the disastrous relationships, everything I’ve learned ... like not to date actresses,” he says.

In Brothers’ case, it’s been as much “where you are” as “Who You Are.”

He was playing open mike nights when he discovered the burgeoning singer-songwriter scene at the Hotel Cafe, and with a boost from one of its pillars, Gary Jules, earned some gigs there. “The Hotel’s where I got my legs,” Brothers says. “Everybody has gravitated to that place; it’s a magnet. It taught me how to write a good song and be totally fearless.”

His big break came when a college buddy from Northwestern, writer-producer Zach Braff, used the twangy “Blue Eyes” in the “Garden State” soundtrack — a song that Brothers, not a fan of country music despite his home turf, calls “kind of short-form Gram Parsons.”

It’s the hidden track on the album, but newer fans might be drawn to “Ride” (in the movie “The Last Kiss”) and the title track, if for nothing else, the video. Brothers dismissed proposals for Hallmark-commercial video treatment. Instead he concocted his own, and even landed Phil Harder to direct it: His band plays a high school dance and intervenes when a jealous boyfriend threatens a nerd. Brothers injured his ankle diving off the stage but gamely finished the shoot. “I hurt my ankle,” he says, “and then we have to shoot the fight scene.”

The tenor of the video (not yet finished) was important to the singer. “People tend to confuse serious singer-songwriters with people who take themselves too seriously,” Brothers says. “This is one way of showing that ain’t me.”

||| See Cary Brothers perform tonight at the Hotel Cafe. [He'll be back in town at the Troubadour on Aug. 22.]

||| Download the title track from "Who You Are."

I'll post the video for "Who You Are" when it becomes available; meanwhile, here's the video for "Ride":