Devin Davis opens the door to his belowground apartment in Wicker Park. “This is where the magic happens,” he says, leading the way through three dim rooms littered with beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays and cluttered with well-loved guitars, drums, keyboards, amps, cables, and mixing consoles. Between 2001 and 2003 Davis spent much of his time here alone, working on his album Lonely People of the World, Unite! He played almost every instrument, and when the disc came out in the fall of ’04 it was on his own label. But despite its minuscule production budget and almost nonexistent PR push–for the first six months Davis just mailed copies to people himself–over the past year the album has become one of the Chicago indie scene’s surprise successes.

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Sonically the album is a dazzling, lively mosaic of bits pillaged from the British Invasion and the homemade psychedelia of the Elephant 6 collective. Lyrically it’s a loose thematic suite about loneliness, but the sad, personal songs are leavened with escapist silliness about outer space and giant spiders. “It has a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments,” says Davis. “I didn’t want the whole ‘lonely people’ concept to be taken too seriously.”

In college in Florida, Davis formed his first band, Irving, which borrowed heavily from Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. They released a single but had trouble holding on to a drummer, and soon Davis turned the group into a solo project, renaming it Irving Philharmonic and putting out a home-recorded album. By 1999, though, he’d decided the Jacksonville scene was a dead end. “Having grown up in Iowa, I’d been to Chicago a bunch,” he says, “and I liked a lot of bands from the city, so I thought, ‘I’ll move there.’”

Davis returned to Acme to finish the mixing and master the album with his friend Jeremy Lemos, the head engineer at the studio. He got the work done just a few days before Acme closed its doors in the summer of 2003. “So I finished the record, but I didn’t really know what I had to do to get it out,” he says. He shopped the disc to indie labels for nearly a year and finally decided just to press a thousand copies himself.

Davis is performing at the Hideout every Wednesday in February. This week he’ll be backed by a full band.

Price: $8