There’s something addictive about Wooster’s music. Clever lyrics, sweet male-female harmonies and laid-back beats combine to make you want to listen to more and more while your feet move with the rhythm.

Nothing about the sound screams studio-born, but that’s where Wooster’s lineage lies. The band, performing June 11 at The Catalyst, got its start at Santa Cruz’s Gadgetbox studios.

It was there that singer-songwriter Brian Gallagher recorded his first acoustic CD, a five-song gift for family and friends.

“Everyone liked it so much that I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I should really try to do a full length CD with a full band,’” said Gallagher, who works as a bartender at the Harbor Cafe. “It took me three years to get it all done, but I met the right people and made the right moves and it all happened.”

The right people included another newbie to the art of the band (local singer Caroline Kuspa, a music major at UC Davis) and five seasoned players (bassist Bobby Hanson, drummer Nate Frederick, piano/organ man Gianni Staiano, trumpeter Dustin Hengl and guitarist Zack Donoghue). Hengl plays regularly with Willie Nelson. Frederick, a professional on the skins since age 14, started with local punk band Jetlag. Staiano is a member of 7 Come 11, as well as a local music teacher. Hanson recently did a national tour with serendipity project. Donoghue is a founding member of the reggae-rock band Epicure.

“It’s fun to have people to really push you as a performer,” said New York-born Gallagher, who grew up in Newport Beach, Calif. “All those guys have such superior confidence because they’ve done it so many times, and they know what they need to do to perform well.”

Wooster —named after the arty street in SoHo, New York, where Gallagher and his family once lived — released its first CD, The Heights of Things this past November. The group heads back into the studio next month to start work on its second album.

Many of Wooster’s current songs tell stories. “Ooh Girl” recounts meeting a girl at a party. “Three Legged Dog” is in some ways the aftermath, a song about where a relationship is headed.

Lyrics like “I’ve been looking for long-term investment, that’s what the sex meant” show off Gallagher’s attention to scansion, legacy from his years as a writing major at UC Santa Cruz. Writing with the band has been a process of letting go for the songwriter.

“I’ve given up that total control [in songwriting] because I know I trust all of the players,” he said. “I’m the spark, but everyone else is the catalyst.”

Though the rhythms he used as an acoustic guitar player remain at the core of many songs, the talents of the band have allowed the sound to expand cross-genre. Kuspa excels at melody, Gallagher said, and has added a lot to the works. The band’s sound — a mix of reggae, rock and bluesy soul — is constantly evolving.

“It’s a really big sound, it’s sonically moving on a physical level and an emotional level. You can really feel the bass, the crack of the drums, the high end of the trumpet. It’s completely encompassing,” he added.

They are in the midst of booking a summer tour along the California coast.

“I definitely have ambitions and big dreams of becoming a touring band successfully making money,” Gallagher said. “We’re shooting for the moon.”

Wooster at The Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. Door open at 8:30 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. June 11. $10 in advance, $14 at the door. (831) 423-1338.

Somewhere in the middle of each Michelle Chappel performance comes the moment when she looks into the audience and asks “Do you have a dream? What is it?” Following your passion is of the utmost importance to the singer-songwriter, whose fifth album Shine was released earlier this year. If Chappel hadn’t followed her bliss, she would still be teaching college psychology instead of singing December 6 at Don Quixote’s International Music Hall.

It’s been more than a decade since Chappel discovered her musical inclinations, and five years since she taught her last class at UC Santa Cruz, where she was once named “Most Inspirational Professor of Psychology.”

“Every year I’m happier than the year before,” said Chappel, who was among the top three winners in the Americana/Folk category of the 2008 Billboard World Song Contest for her single, “No Place Like Home.” “That doesn’t mean there aren’t struggles and more self discovery, but the more I get on that path, the more I feel like I’m healing myself.”

That path has included a top 10 album in South Africa, CD releases in 25 European countries, a song in the UK top 20, performances around the world and a mini-hit (at 28,000 views) on YouTube with her music video of “Screw You Yahoo!”

Her latest video, “You’re an Original,” was filmed in Santa Cruz. The song is about learning about and accepting your gifts, something it took a long time for Chappel to do.

“I like to teach workshops about true passions and gifts because a lot of times you don’t know early in life,” said the psychologist who has consulted for companies including Yahoo!, Google and TiVo.

It wasn’t until she was about to graduate Princeton University with a PhD in psychology that the Atlanta, GA native learned she could could sing. A broken engagement led her to enroll in a community college guitar workshop as a way to break out of the blues. It was there that a teacher helped her discover her voice.

“I was supposed to defend my dissertation a month later, so it was kind of eye-opening and not great timing,” Chappel remembered. “I already had a job waiting for me as a professor. I already had a path I was going down and I had made agreements. I kind of saw myself as one way….”

Instead of nurturing her talent, Chappel ignored it for a few years. All the while, she counseled her students — first at Santa Clara University and later at UC Santa Cruz — to follow their hearts.

“One day…somebody walked out my door and she looked so happy and I suddenly thought ‘Wait a minute, I’m not following my own advice. There’s a dream I have too, that’s buried way way deep, that seems a little bit crazy and that’s to be a rock and roll star.’”

While still teaching, she started writing and performing songs. Marriage brought her to South Africa, where she found a larger audience for her music.

“In South Africa I was a musician and here I was still a professor doing some shows at night. Students would come to the shows, some of my students even played in my band,” Chappel said. “But when I was in South Africa, I actually got signed to Polygram…. I was doing tours and I was on the radio and I was doing interviews on the radio. It was like a complete change of identity.”

Chappel said she feels like she uses her degree in cognitive psychology in both her music and her workshops. She hopes her music will help people heal as individuals and as a society. Women, especially, have responded to the song “You Can Make It” off of the Shine album.

“It’s kind of ambiguous as to what you’re making it through,” Chappel said. “I’ve had people tell me it’s helped them through addictions, it’s helped them to let go of old boyfriends, things like that.”

If she imparts a sense of hope and optimism to her audiences, then Chappel feels like her music has succeeded.

“I want to…plant a little seed to stir up some hidden passion,” she said.

Michelle Chappel at Don Quixote’s International Music Hall, 6275 Highway 9, Felton. $8 in advance, $10 at the door. Under 21 allowed with parent. (831) 603-2294.

Eric Ronick and Than Luu of Black Gold perform Sunday at The Crepe Place. (Photo courtesy Black Gold)

The digital age has been good to the duo behind Black Gold. First, Craigslist helped Than Luu find his way back into music. Then iTunes bumped the band onto the map by picking their song “Detroit” as a Single of the Week in October 2008. The upbeat tune with downbeat lyrics received more than 425,000 downloads and has been remixed by DJs across the country.

Even so, the Brooklyn-based band is more into live performance than taped perfection. “We really want people to see us live,” Luu said. “We’re musicians playing the songs. We’re not crazy light shows and tracks.”

On tour supporting their first album, Rush, Luu and musical partner Eric Ronick bring Black Gold to Santa Cruz’s The Crepe Place on Sunday (October 25) in a double bill with Girl in a Coma. It will be Luu’s first visit to Santa Cruz.

“I lived in San Francisco, but I never came down to Santa Cruz,” said the Vietnam-born artist who grew up in Southern California.

Music sucked in the San Fernando Valley boy from the first time he hit a pot and pan set with a pair of chopsticks at age 12. The drummer played in bands until he went to University of California Hastings School of Law, then he left it all behind for the working world.

“I was a corporate whore. I prostituted my brain,” said Luu, who also plays guitar, bass, keyboards and “most of the rock instruments.” “It was real life and really respectable, but it’s not what I was put here to do.”

Quitting the rat race of practicing law on Wall Street, Luu started answering band ads on Craigslist and “got lucky.” It was through there that he met “musical matchmaker” Jacob Feinberg-Pyne, a sound engineer and tour manager who has worked with the likes of Modest Mouse and Gillian Welch.

Feinberg-Pyne introduced Luu to Ronick while they were both on tour in 2006 with Ambulance Ltd. Ronick was playing keyboards, while Luu worked behind the scenes. A jam session on the set of The Craig Kilbourn Show inspired the duo to form Black Gold.

The band takes its name from the type of music Luu and Ronick write — shimmering pop anthems with twisty, dark lyrics. Take “Breakdown,” the third track on their first album, for example. “I’m telling you that this is going to be your tragic time. Stuck up in your private hand. And best to do in this tragic world, and girl don’t you make me watch you cry…” is sung to a driving, danceable, boppy beat.

“I love dark subject matter in a pop song. Without the dark, you can’t enjoy the light as well,” said Luu, a fan of The Smiths and The Cure. “Listen to a Cure song. It’s so poppy, then the lyrics are weird and dark.”

Ronick and Luu — who have each worked with groups including Panic! at the Disco, M. Ward, The Boredoms and Adam Franklin of Swervedriver — write their songs together.

“It’s very old school, like almost Tin Pan Alley,” Luu said. “It’s just two dudes, getting drunk, smoking a little weed, sitting by a guitar and a piano and just writing songs.”

One will bring a song idea and the other will flesh it out. Lyrics and melody are worked on together, making the songs true collaborations. “Both cooks have their hands in the dough.”

Black Gold’s tunes have lent themselves to various remixes by artists across the country. “Detroit” has been blended by the likes of hip-hop DJ Arthur Baker and San Diego group Shark Attack. Over the summer the band held a remix contest, offering prizes for the best new version of “Plans & Reveries,” to help garner publicity for their Black Gold: The Remixes album.

“I’ve been a big advocate of getting our songs remixed because I love people’s interpretations,” Luu said. Shark Attack’s version of “Detroit” ranks high. “They really took it to another level. They added some of that grit in the tones to it.”

Remixing is a way of evolving — and evolution is one of the keys for Luu to Black Gold’s future. The musician would love to see the band continue to make music and tour for years to come.

“When I think about the artists who I adore and admire, it boils down to longevity and consistency of quality of work, but with evolution,” Luu said.

Black Gold and Girl in a Coma play the front room. 9 p.m. The Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave. Santa Cruz. $8. (831) 429-6994.

Good songs, said Gretchen Peters, deepen with your experience of life. “The bad ones, you abandon by the roadside.” Peters should know. The award-winning singer-songwriter, appearing Tuesday (September 8 ) at Don Quixote’s, has written some very good songs.

The ones most people recognize are associated with top tier country artists: “Independence Day,” Martina McBride; “The Secret of Life,” Faith Hill; “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am,” Patty Loveless; ” “If Heaven,” Andy Griggs. But there are so many more — yearning personal tunes like “Jezebel” and “When You Are Old,” the color-filled stories of “This Used to be My Town” and “Sunday Morning” — sung in Peters’ rich voice.

“They evolve on the road,” Peters said. “They evolve with each performance.”

It is only in the past three years that American audiences have been able to connect with the artist as a performer, courtesy of the folk/Americana movement. Before then, she was pigeonholed as a “country” artist in the States — a designation that failed to connect her with audiences — even while in the United Kingdom, she played to packed venues.

Then, in 2006, she worked with roots music legend Tom Russell, who suggested the folk scene. It was a natural fit, as Peters recent sweep of the Just Plain Folks awards last month shows. She won three awards for Northern Lights (Best Holiday Album), Burnt Toast & Offerings (Best Country Album) and Trio (Best Live Album) plus Songwriter of the Year.

“Really this is what I wanted to do from moment I picked up a guitar,” Peters said of touring. “I’m not the kind of person who wanted to sit in a room and then write a song.”

Born in New York, Peters grew up in Colorado where she became inspired by the regional music scene. At 19, she submitted a homemade tape to the Boulder Music Weekend music competition and won. She kept writing and singing. In the late ’80s, she moved to Nashville with her now ex-husband and daughter. Though she considered herself both a singer and a songwriter, Peters signed a publishing deal and eventually found her songs climbing the charts with other artists’ voices.

It took a long time before Peters recorded her own album, 1996′s The Secret of Life. Since then, Peters has recorded a new CD every few years. Her popularity in the U.K. is such that her record company convinced her to put out a greatest hits album, Circus Girl, released in May.

“It was bizarre….they were calling it a greatest hits album and I was saying, ‘I don’t have any hits!’” Peters said. None of her songs have topped the American charts with her as the vocalist.

A limited edition of the album includes a second disk filled with live recordings and mementoes of her career: bits of lyrics, odd songs that never made any albums, the interview she did at 19. “It’s almost like an inside journey,” she said.

It’s the real life journeys that Peters credits with keeping her grounded and in tune. Touring with partner and keyboard player Barry Walsh brings her closer to her songs and to herself. When she sings, Peters finds herself inhabiting a character through song, like acting. The songs take over.

“I find myself more moved by my own songs when playing them than I ever was when listening to the record,” she said.

Tunes that she has discovered anew through performance include “Circus Girl,” “Love and Texaco” and “Like Water into Wine.” One of the songs Peters never stopped playing through the years is “On A Bus To St. Cloud,” a hit for Trisha Yearwood.

“It’s gone through a huge evolution. It’s proven itself to have depth that I still haven’t gotten to,” she said of the song listed on her website as one of her two favorites. The other is “The Way You Move Me.”

Playing on the road has helped Peters feel like she’s finally in the right skin.

“What I said when I was 18 years old was I just want to make a living at this. I just want to find a way to make a living as a musician,” she said. “And that word, musician, was really key. I didn’t say as a songwriter or even as a singer-songwriter. I really thought of myself as a musician.”

This will be Peters’ third show at Don Quixote’s. The first two were marked by some pretty dramatic occurrences.

“We had an earthquake just before we went onstage the first time and the second time was during all those fires. We’re kind of like. ‘What have you got for us now, Santa Cruz?’” Peters laughed.

Gretchen Peters at Don Quixote’s. Folk in A also performs. 7:30 p.m. Don Quixote’s International Music Hall, 6275 Highway 9, Felton. $10. Under 21 allowed with parent. (831) 603-2294.

What is it about the times that inspire bluegrass fusion? Recently, bands coming through Santa Cruz have mixed the banjo-dobro-mandolin-fiddle form with rock (Jedd Brothers), punk (The Shitkickers, The Hackensaw Boys) and jazz-funk (Grampa’s Chili). So perhaps banjo rap was inevitable. The Deadly Gentlemen bring their mix of hip-hop and Americana to Don Quixote’s on Thursday, August 27.

“Trust us, this is not what you are expecting,” said Greg Liszt, banjo player and vocalist, on the band’s website.

Lyrics, tripping off Liszt’s tongue, tell of working man blues, the end of the world, the ghosts of ex-lovers, drunken binges and the pursuit of a woman. The gentle cadences of “Roll Me, Tumble Me” bring to mind the spoken word section of Shawn Mullins’ “Lullaby,” while the faster-paced, drank-too-much tune “The Splendor of a Blender” is more recognizable as being rooted in rap. The Deadly Gentlemen released their debut album, The Bastard Masterpiece last May.

Liszt, who in the past few years completed international tour with Bruce Springsteen and a Ph. D. in Molecular Biology from MIT, is joined by Josh Pinkham on mandolin, fiddler Michael Barnett and Sam Grisman on double bass.

“The Deadly Gentlemen have come up with a winning combination, a hip-hop and bluegrass hybrid that’ll leave your head spinning while it slaps a loony grin on yer face,” said J. Poet, reviewing their album for the webzine Crawdaddy!.

The Deadly Gentlemen at Don Quixote’s. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, August 27. Don Quixote’s International Music Hall, 6275 Highway 9, Felton. $10. Age 21+. (831) 603-2294.

Find out what else is going on this week. Complete listings at The Week, The Weekend and Everything Else.