The overalls were not just a prop for the publicity shots on his website. When I meet Christopher Denny for the first time in person, he is loading into the Canal Room in New York, looking more like a coal shoveler on the 19th century railroad in striped bib overalls and a train conductor’s cap than an indie rocker. His piercing, light-colored eyes give him the look of a serious Dickensian literary character, and his accent is torn straight out of a hot summer afternoon in the South.

With lyrics that evoke Gypsy girls and dark-wood cabinet radios laid over old-timey three-chord blues progressions, Denny’s music is antique in all ways but one: His voice. Denny spins his melodic yarns with an otherworldly high, tremulous trill that is timeless in a way that implies the future where his traditionally timeless instrumentations invoke the past.

The newly-wed Denny travels everywhere with his wife and his aptly-named backing band, the Old Soles, and just a few minutes into meeting them all, it is clear that Denny is not a novelty act. He isn’t putting on his farm-boy image to make his blues seem more genuine. Christopher Denny is a real deal chicken-fried Southern gothic with a voice garnered from either a deal with the Devil or with God.

Further proving the suspicion that a sinister pact was made somewhere along the line for those pipes, Denny tells me that his voice was not always the distinctive, high-pitched, Antony Haggerty-esque warble that it is today. Early on, Denny was a tiny Hank Williams. “I was singing when I was five-years-old, singing songs like Lynyrd Skynyrd, because I grew up in that kind of family,” Denny drawls, his speaking voice much more normal than I expected. “It was so twangy, like, ‘Gotta little chaaaaaange in my pocket,’ and it was funny, because I was just this little hick kid cutting the rug down at a place called the Jug.”

It wasn’t until he stopped growing at 5’8” that Denny returned to music as a teen and found his new voice, although his subject matter was more pop culture-based then. After some family upheaval, which he is reluctant to discuss, Denny moved in with his aunt and uncle. “I was about 14, I got a guitar and started singing again. People say I started to play in church, but the truth is, the first show I ever really did was at the Homecoming assembly in 10th grade,” Denny remembers. “We got up on stage and played these songs. One of them we had written, and I think it went something like, ‘I’m mad, I’m crazy, I really love Daisy from MTV to Long Beach.’”

Denny describes a mysterious epiphany he had in his teens. Although he doesn’t flat out call it a religious experience, the implications are everywhere in his story. “I went through this sort of rebellious thing,” he explains. “It ended in an experience that brought me to a point where I saw that all people are from the light. I believe I’ve lived before, you know. This isn’t my first life.” He claims that realization as the inspiration for his catchy, upbeat track “Time.” The final line of the song, “I got back home and I felt this emptiness inside / Me and my friend finally put a finger on what it was / It was the need to rid myself of time,” Denny’s claim sums up his entire philosophy of life. The relationship between humans and time is irrelevant and unnecessarily stressful; time goes on with us or without us, while our souls outlive time.