Ten years after his last show with Dwight Yoakam, Pete Anderson is still getting praise for his work with the Bakersfield country star turned bit-part actor. It’s not something he objects to: even though their relationship ended in litigation, he’s proud of the records he made with the lanky singer. But every once in a while the California-by-way-of-Detroit guitarist finds himself having to suppress what he’d really like to say in return.

“I guess if I was to go, ‘Great! Thank you for the compliment, but you’ve only heard a third of what I can do,’ then they’d go, ‘Oh, that guy, he’s self-centred,’ ” he says, laughing. But an advance copy of his sixth solo record—Birds Above Guitarland, scheduled for a September release on his own Little Dog imprint—suggests his claim would be modest.

Miraculously, Anderson has somehow managed to find a fresh and personal way of melding three key American forms: blues, jazz, and country. He’s not doing anything that couldn’t have been done in the 1960s, but no one else has ever done it quite like this—although unsung blues-guitar great Robert Junior Lockwood might have come up with something similar, had he snagged a guest spot with Frank Sinatra’s band.

The thought clearly amuses Anderson, who’s taking a break from recording jingles in his Burbank, California, home studio.

“Lockwood, I think, was the best of that ilk, of the Chicago blues guys,” he comments. “So you nailed it. I think I’ve always tried to play that ‘I’ve got nothing to prove’ style of guitar. It’s like when [Detroit Lions running back] Barry Sanders would score a touchdown and he’d hand the ball to the referee and walk away instead of dancing. It was basically saying, ‘I’m going to be here a lot.’ So I’m going to get a lot of opportunities to solo, and I’ll try to do things that make sense in the context of the song.”

Hot but tasteful guitar playing isn’t the only attraction on Birds Above Guitarland. Anderson has also matured into a soulful singer and an imaginative songwriter, whether he’s penning double-entendre blues (“Fix It Man”) or bemoaning the sad state of the American working class (“Big Money”). It’s all part of a process that began when his first major post-Yoakam collaboration, with would-be honky-tonk hero Moot Davis, went sideways.

“It was my label, I owned everything, and I was the bandleader, but it was this guy’s career,” Anderson recalls. “He wrote the songs, and he was singing, and after we released a second record, he flaked out. So I was like, ‘You know, I’m not going to invest that kind of time into a situation I can’t control.’ I wanted to flip my career around from being a record producer who played guitar and made records on occasion to being a guitar player who made records and toured and didn’t stop touring and playing and making records.”

No easy task, given that by Anderson’s estimate the music business has declined by some 70 percent since the Yoakam days. Still, he’s finding ways to make it happen—such as touring with only a drummer and a keyboardist who covers bass duties with his left hand.

“It’s a great way to work, actually,” he says. “One thing for sure is that the bass player and the piano player are really locked in, ’cause they’re the same guy!”