Alum Nic Russo Dreams of Nashville on New Album

TOXCY -- “Nashville Dreams” is an album about misadventure. It’s written from the perspective of Dick Stusso, who’s so besotted with the thought of Nashville — imagined as a place where rural idyll and Industry Machinery coexist — that he seeks it out, weathering plenty of indignities on the highway. Of course, fantasies prove elusive. And it does not end well. Stusso winds up dead or drunk, drowning the dream. Dick Stusso is something of an avatar for Nic Russo, who plays every instrument on the album and articulates the intrepid character’s frenzied excitement and crestfallen fate quite convincingly. Russo is a longtime home recordist, but “Nashville Dreams” — packaged with a less conceptually uniform group of songs called “Sings the Blues” — is his first album, released recently via Vacant Stare. Russo grew up in an East Bay suburb and of studied Political Science at San Francisco State University. His father, Marc Russo, performs with the Doobie Brothers.