For Gabe Hascall, everything is new. A new city, new wife and his first solo album. It has been a long time coming, this fresh start, but he’s making the most of it now.

In 2008, Hascall was lost. He’d taken a three-year hiatus from playing music after leaving Los Angeles for his native Austin, Texas. While Austin was where Hascall got his start—first with popular punk-ska standouts The Impossibles, then with the mellower acclaimed offshoot duo Slowreader—his three years back home were spent mostly in isolation. He was writing songs, he says, but his mind was clouded.

When Hascall picked Portland as the destination for a fresh start, it was less a musical decision than a lifestyle choice. He moved into a friend’s basement (former Elliott Smith drummer Scott McPherson), took a low-key job in a warehouse, developed a serious coffee addiction and spent free time with his cat, Ruben. And he wrote—building a library of songs that later became full-band demos produced by McPherson. Though the recordings showed promise, Hascall felt anxious about them—he needed the songs, not their instrumentation, to be the focus. “I really wanted to shine a light on the intangibles. They were trying to hide,” he says now.

The twelve songs on Hascall’s debut disc, “Racing Slowly,” evidence that bold and sudden change in direction. He has stripped his songs down to a bare minimum of voice and guitar to create a revealing, vulnerable new musical approach that almost seems strung directly from Hascall’s heart to yours.

That he manages such a distinctive sound with so few tools is a testament both to Hascall’s unique vision and his private work ethic. The churning, almost harp-like guitar strums that lay a quilt beneath sweet songs like the lullabic “Season Everything” and the confessional “Early in the Night” are just as easily identifiable as Hascall’s delicate voice. That voice is put to complex tests by Hascall’s trapeze-like songwriting, jumping into falsetto on a moments notice and embracing his rolling, wordplay-rich verses. Hascall stretches these talents to the limit on challenging songs like the dizzying “Until Forever” and the tender closer, “Finish Forwards.”

For Gabe, releasing his long-overdo debut disc is more than a musical re-boot, it’s a rediscovery of the joy of making music. “Writing songs is the only thing I do really well,” he says. “I don’t know...maybe not the only thing.”