Martin Dosh laughed while imagining what the namesake of his new CD, "Tommy," might have thought of the title.
"He'd have probably thought it was hilarious and said, 'You can't do that! It's already the name of a Who album.'"
His seventh and most dense-sounding record under his instrumental solo band name Dosh, "Tommy" was started after his friend Tom Cesario died suddenly from asphyxiation 15 months ago. The two met at Benilde-St. Margaret's High School, and Cesario went on to be a sound engineer for Dosh as well as for Yo La Tengo and First Avenue. His death also came just a month after cancer killed an uncle to whom Dosh was close.
"It's hard to say how that stuff colors what comes out of you, especially in my case where the music doesn't involve words," said Dosh, 37. "But I know the emotions are there. All of my albums are sort of wordless snapshots of whatever I was going through at the time of making them."
Because Dosh went on to spend most of 2009 touring in Illinois indie-rock hero Andrew Bird's band (as drummer/keyboardist), he is just now getting around to releasing "Tommy" with a trio of hometown release parties. Each show will be a little different: Friday's 7th Street Entry gig will be more vintage Dosh with Eyedea's group Face Candy as openers; Saturday's concert at MacPhail Center for Music will be a purely solo show complemented with a Q&A, and Sunday's party at the Bedlam Theatre is a tour kickoff with road partners White Hinterland (from Portland, Ore.) and Dosh's nearly full-time bandmate, Mike Lewis.
More and more, Dosh has recruited Lewis -- Happy Apple saxophonist and another of Bird's backers -- to play on his albums. "He's like my other appendage now," Dosh said.
Just as Lewis' involvement is hardly a surprise, a couple of the tracks on "Tommy" should sound familiar to Dosh devotees. "Call the Kettle" has been a live staple and was used in a music video, but it's reinvented here. Also, the stormy 8-minute closer, "Gare de Lyon," was originally recorded by Dosh's old band Lateduster. He and Lewis reworked it over several years.
Another track long in the making, "Number 41," features Bird on vocals and fits in here, since it was partly inspired by Soul Asylum bassist Karl Mueller's passing at age 41. Dosh had the foundation of the song for years and handed it over to Bird, who "walked around with it in his head in New Orleans one day on tour, and came back with the finishing pieces," Dosh recalled.
