“I am New York, tired and weak,” sings Richard Swift on the title track of The Novelist  ”I try to write a book each time I speak.” The voice, buoyed up by elegiac piano and vibraphone, is tremulous, an old-young man alone in a city bed-sit, scooped hollow by hunger and love and late-night thoughts.

Listening to this lush, richly imagined song-cycle is like nosing about in the back of a junk shop, and amid the war-medals and costume jewelry finding a box of forgotten letters. A dead love affair returned vividly to life with guitars, harps, and trumpets, draped in static and melancholy. Swift’s ragtime-inflected melodies are choked with dust and memories, evoking old tenement stairwells, late afternoon light, love gone bad. “Listen to Dylan, shut the door. Nobody cares anymore,” he continues, “Trying so hard to craft a rhyme with nickels and dimes.”

Such mordantly witty and affecting lyrics are hard to come by in an age of sensitive young men and women armed with guitars, bruised hearts and laptops. Oh, and here’s the thing: Swift, a Minnesota farm boy who pays the rent with production work on dance tracks, recorded The Novelist on a 4-track. You can hear it, too, in the analog warmth and hiss, in the meanderings of a vivid imagination set free by limited choice. His relative youth, taste for golden-age Americana and way with addled sonics suggest a fresh-faced Tom Waits. “It’s gonna be a lovely night,” he sings over drunken, brawling piano, “and I wish that I was never born” (Lovely Night).

Like Lou Reed’s Berlin, the doomed-love of The Novelist takes as its setting a city – New York – that comes with a trove of associations and imagery. The two albums even share a song title – Lady Day. But instead of Reed’s bile, you’ll find yearning, regret, nostalgia, even a kind of spiritual awakening: “Remember when I loved you babe? Christ was king that day. Some broken-hearted drummers played guitars in his parade” (Looking back, I should have been home more)

If you need comparisons, try Rufus Wainwright, Van Dyke Parks, even Jeff Buckley. But Swift, with his roaming talent and Bakelite dreams, is busy staking out his own patch of Tin Pan Alley. Originally given a limited release in 2003, The Novelist has been re-released as a double with the earlier Walking Without Effort.