Gene Casey Is Naughty And Nice On New CD

Rock-and-roller Gene Casey has a secret: his guilty pleasure is 1960s pop music.

And the front man of Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks is unashamed. In fact, his newest album, “Untrained,” shows that he is not about to shy away from his love of popular oldies.

In an unprecedented move, Mr. Casey has gone semi-solo for this album, he explained during a telephone interview last week. He said he’s steering away from the quintessential Lone Sharks’ party record toward a more singer-songwriter vibe. It’s a welcome change for the musician but might be a bit of a shock for the 25-year-old band’s longtime fans.

“I just needed to get these songs out, out in the world,” Mr. Casey said. “That actually freed me up because I was able to not worry about my fans saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t rock and roll. It doesn’t sound like you guys. Where’s the saxophone?’ It’s more like a Gene record. The whole band’s on five or six tunes, bass is on almost all the tunes. And they understand what I was trying to do. I was trying to put the songs first on this record, as opposed to the band first.”

Growing up, Mr. Casey had two fantasies. He would either play centerfield for the New York Yankees or become a musician, he said.

“I’m still waiting for the call from the Yankees, I don’t know what’s going on,” the Sag Harbor resident laughed. “And the funny thing is, a lot of times musicians will say, ‘The reason I got into music was I wanted to meet chicks.’ That’s actually not the case for me. I didn’t associate it with that. I was too young to even think that way. I just wanted to sing and play guitar. And they never left me. I was hooked.”

Mr. Casey first picked up a guitar when he was 9 years old. He struggled to make chords initially, he said, but he was an early music fanatic. The boy was making up his own songs before his 10th birthday.

“I was always the young kid in the garage band they put up with,” he said. “I’m old enough to vaguely, vaguely remember seeing The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, due to the influence of my older brother and sister, who stuck me in front of the television. Those are my earliest childhood memories. We were singing and doing air guitar from the beginning. Learning how to play guitar and writing songs came at the same time. The fact that The Beatles wrote their own songs somehow instilled in me that’s how you do it. That’s what you do if you really want to make a mark.”

Mr. Casey kicks off his album with an upbeat, whimsical, rockabilly track, “I Think About Elvis Every Day.” The sentiment occurred to him during a casual conversation with a friend earlier this year, he said. It got him to thinking.

“There have been so many tributes to Elvis that are very serious and over-the-top cheesy things. I didn’t want to write another cheesy tribute song to him,” Mr. Casey said. “I wanted to acknowledge what a powerful force his is in not only musical culture but in an everyday, walking-down-the-street way. I wanted the humor to be there in the song, but it’s also true.”

Up next is “We Don’t Mind If It Rains,” which wound up setting the pace for the entire record, Mr. Casey reported.

“If this were a pure Lone Sharks party record, I probably wouldn’t have done this song because it’s got a lot of ’60s influence—Beach Boys, Beatles and so on—which is not a sound that I think our fan base really associates with us,” he said. “But that was the purpose of this record, to go with a gut feeling. This is a good song. This is me. I kind of indulged in that fascination with great melodies and back-up singers—which are all me, by the way.”

He laughed, and continued, “Once I decided to do that song and put it on the record, that kind of guided the record for me.”

Mr. Casey also released his first holiday song, “Christmas Lights,” and makes it a point to explore love and relationships on the album.

“The particular woman in my life is my wife, Heather,” he said. “But I’ve been around a long time and had a lot of blue situations in my life. So I have a backlog of blues ideas. Sad songs are easier to write than happy songs. I’ve been kicked around the block a few times, learned a few things that stick with you. My songs are either really depressing or really naughty. I kind of mixed those two things up.”

“Untrained,” which dropped earlier this month, is all Mr. Casey represents as a musician, he said. And the album title reflects that.

“I think it was just conjuring up the notion of raw and kind of untamed,” he said. “As a musician and as a singer, I’m self-taught and I’m an untrained singer, you can say. I wanted to just bring that looseness to the title. Something that was not polished, not glossy. It’s more like me. Like it or not, this is what I sound like.”

Not perfect, he said, but honest.

For more information on the album, and to find out about upcoming gigs, visit lonesharks.com.