Conventionally speaking, artists resort to recording albums of other people’s songs when they’ve run out of fresh ideas. But that’s not the case for Andy Cabic of San Francisco–based folk-noir alchemists Vetiver, whose just-released third disc, Thing of the Past, is nothing but covers.

When the singer-guitarist picks up the phone in Sacramento, you can hear the sound of a band in the background. Even though Thing of the Past has just hit record stores, he’s hard at work in a studio called the Hangar, where Vetiver is already working on a follow-up. Cabic says he’s feeling particularly inspired these days, mostly because he learned so much reworking the tunes of others for the collection, which was recorded in the same room he’s in today.

“I have a band that I put together after the release of To Find Me Gone,” he says, referring to Vetiver’s 2006 sophomore album. “So before this record [Thing of the Past], I had never really tracked with them. Recording at the Hangar was sort of an opportunity to play live, get things down, and go from there. It was a good exercise in freedom and discipline and having a template to work from, but not being afraid to add your own personal style to what you’re doing.”

As cover records go, you can file Thing of the Past in the radical-reinterpretation category, giving it more in common with Rage Against the Machine’s Renegades than, say, Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident. Where To Find Me Gone served up smouldering Americana laced with sweeping strings and desert-noir pedal steel, Cabic is now willing to turn up the amps. Check out the serrated guitar squalls in the otherwise acoustic “Houses” by ’60s cult heroine Elyse Weinberg. (“You should hear the original—she has Neil Young playing those leads, which is even more mind-bendingly interruptive.”) Elsewhere, Norman Greenbaum’s “Hook and Ladder” starts out with campfire guitar and ends up flared with all-hands-on-deck chanting and New Orleans funeral-march brass, and Hawkwind’s “Hurry on Sundown” filters alt-country through the Velvet Underground circa the Factory years.

Most striking about Thing of the Past—which also includes numbers by Michael Hurley, Loudon Wainwright III, and Townes Van Zandt—is that, like To Find Me Gone, it has an analogue warmth that’s increasingly rare in this digital age. Cabic, who moonlights as a guitarist with psych-folk surrealist Devendra Banhart, suggests that’s more by accident than by design; he’s not one of those dogmatists slavishly devoted to recording on reel-to-reel tape.

“I’m definitely not beholden to any one kind of technology,” he reveals. “I listen to vinyl, and that’s what I buy, but that’s because it’s cheap and because I’ve bought it ever since I was a kid.”

For proof of his obsession with the 12-inch format, look no further than Thing of the Past’s album art. The cover has a Rose McGowan look-alike camped out in a living room that’s straight out of ’73, complete with a wickedly retro turntable and amp, and a wall of old-fashioned LPs. Forget set-dressing—the picture gives you a good idea of where Cabic went looking when he decided to make an album of covers.

“That’s actually my living room and my stereo,” he says with a laugh. “What you see is what I listen to music on when I’m at home.”

Vetiver plays the Media Club on Saturday (May 3).