The story of Love Will Find You, Findlay Brown's top-drawer US debut for Verve Forecast, begins with the 29-year-old Englishman finding himself on his sister's sofa after being struck by a cab, recuperating from a broken leg. For Brown, alone with a tune-challenged yet stubbornly magical heirloom guitar that had treated him well creatively in the past, this unlikely stretch of time occasioned research as pleasurable as it was enforced.

"I had none of my records with me," recalls the Yorkshire native, whose Separated by the Sea, his 2007 UK debut, met with highest praise from London critics. "I revisited and rediscovered do-wop, Elvis, Roy Orbison, as well as a lot of soul music like Motown and other '60s black music. I was really doing my homework. I would sit with that old guitar and my computer, downloading tracks off i-Tunes, whether it be vintage Phil Spector or whatever, literally studying the songs -- what the bass was doing, what the drums were doing. It was a good chance to be completely immersed, with no distractions, just laid on the sofa because of my broken leg. Pretty much nothing else to do."

Comprehensive research by a self-described "musical obsessive," however, formed only the starting point for Love Will Find You , which has emerged as the richest of current sonic experiences. A life-long fan of '60s rock and the Beatles ("They're always there…"), Brown has managed to fuse the driven and searching qualities of music by late-'60s west coast American avatars such as Jimi Hendrix , Spirit, and Captain Beefheart with ostensibly more conservative songwriting styles rooted in the more compositionally succinct ways from the immediate eras before psychedelicism.