The Capstan Shafts were a mystery. No one knew who they were. In the past three years they had released eight albums and a dozen EPs—a quick Google search turns up over 14,000 hits and Pitchfork recently reviewed their last three albums all at once, scoring those 8.2, 7.2, and 7.8 respectively. But until earlier this month, no one even knew what the band looked like. There were no pictures, no press kits, and there were no live performances. Turns out there’s only a sole member, Dean Wells, who slowly and quietly built a small, rabid following by self-distributing his homemade, bedroom-recorded albums while earning a living as a furniture maker in the small town of Lyndonville, Vermont.

Now, Wells is leaving the bedroom. This year his album Environ Maiden was picked up for wide distribution by the Rainbow Quartz label. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to play the CMJ festival in New York City. It was the second time he’d ever played live. “It was intimidating,” says Wells. “I’d never been to New York before. It was so surreal. It was just this weekend so it will probably take me a few days to even realize what happened.”

The Capstan Shafts music is startlingly catchy, lo-fi, melancholic pop rock that sounds like the Smiths if they covered Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The lyrics convey sweeping romanticism, but the music is rooted in the rustling imperfection of everyday. He writes and records alone at home on a four-track, and the recordings have a warm layer of tape hiss as a result. “To be honest, I just love that sound and I always have. Even bad copies of real albums sound good to me that way. I think that goes back to me as a kid. I had a record player that played too fast with crappy speakers and that was the vocabulary of music to me—crappy sounding things—walkmans that didn’t quite work and record players that played wrong.”

Despite his solo approach to recording, the albums are full of texture and instrumentation. “I’ll play the initial track, the rhythm and singing, usually acoustic, and just layer stuff until I’m happy with it. The song’s usually pretty rough when I do the initial track. Until I had to learn them to perform them, pretty much, the track you hear on the album, that’s the only time the song’s been played all the way through.”

The name Capstan Shafts is a wry reference to Wells’s recording style. “It’s part of a tape recorder. I saw it in the manual of a four-track and I saw it highlighted—I guess it jumped out at me. It’s the part of a tape recorder that the tape runs around. I was using a beat up four-track and it just seemed totally appropriate.”

His eighth album, Environ Maiden, was released on October 16th and is the first to be available in actual brick-and-mortar stores. The title is “kind of a smart-ass joke. It’s kind of a play on environmentalism as a theme in the album. A very loose theme.”

On October 6th, Wells played his debut show, solo, in a rural 19th century, one-room church in Stannard, Vermont. The venue was close to the middle of nowhere and the performances had to be done by candlelight. “It was a little past nowhere, actually. I had never even been up there. There was a dirt road and it was rainy and the road was washing out. So, even by my standards, it was the middle of nowhere. It was fun. I was very nervous about doing it. But they were a very friendly crowd, nice people. There was no electricity. But it was a good venue. It was very dark.

“I had already agreed to do the CMJ thing just because I thought it’d be ridiculous not to and some promoters from Burlington asked me to do that, and I thought it would be good practice in front of people since I had never been in front of people before. It was only like two weeks before so I figured it was a good way” he pauses, “I’m just getting used to it.”

For the CMJ show Wells wanted to showcase the sound of the songs as they are on the albums. Since he plays all of the instruments on the record himself, he needed some sonic support. A “friend of a friend” introduced him to the band, Rural Electric. “I think they had a hard time kind of figuring out what I was doing when I was showing them because they’re more like, real musicians and, I’m, I’m not really. They had a hard time figuring out what I meant. They did a good job, but it’s difficult if you’re not used to talking to people about music—it’s difficult to translate your ideas to them. And I’d never actually had a conversation about music other than just as a listener, as a fan. I’d never had a conversation about music in terms of chords; this is a diminished C or whatever.”

Bootlegs of the CMJ showcase have surfaced online and the full band sounds righteous. When asked about recording with a group in the future, he’s enthusiastic. “I would love to. I would love to hear band interpretations. Not necessarily in the studio, but ya know, have a band playing in the basement—I would love to hear that. But I would almost have to record the album all the way through and then re-do it. I don’t know that I could write things thinking of other people. I think I’d have to finish it and then re-do it. It’s just never been an option. I don’t really know any musicians or at least not those interested in the kind of music that I like. And the band I played with at CMJ is like five hours away. They’re in Belfast, Maine.”