"Time hangs heavy on the vine/Let's make wine," Ryan Montbleau sings in the lulling, sensual verse that gives his group's new album its title. Ryan Montbleau Band has been tending its own musical vineyard for a few years, on the patient cusp of a breakthrough. Their distinctive, long-fermenting blend of neo-folk, classic soul, and kick-out-the-jams Americana finally comes to full fruition in Heavy on the Vine, due out September 21, 2010 on indie Blue's Mountain Records. It's an album that represents the product of — and further promise of — a very good year.

It's been a good year already. The group spent much of it both as opening act and backing band for Martin Sexton, including a round of dates with the Dave Matthews Band. Sexton in turn produced Heavy on the Vine. "I used to dream about getting to meet Martin Sexton," says Ryan, "and now we're getting hired as his backing band and he's producing our record.

"He may not be a household name but to me and so many others, he's a legend," Montbleau adds. "But one thing he made clear from the start was that he didn't want his fingerprints on this record. He wanted us to just play and be us."

As a songwriter, Ryan recently contributed the single "Something Beautiful" to Trombone Shorty's recent major-label debut album Backatown. Shorty turned to no less than Lenny Kravitz to contribute vocals and a guitar solo to the track, to help bring across the song's soulful vibe. Ryan also co-wrote the Backatown track "One Night Only," the tune Shorty and his band performed on their Late Night with David Letterman debut in June.

"I'm not one of these people who's like, 'Oh, we can't be pigeonholed.' I honestly wish we could, just so I could describe it quickly to people," Montbleau says. "This record has folk songs, funk songs, country tunes, a reggae tune . . . and the end is almost like prog-rock. It's all over the map, but it's all us, and we always do it wholeheartedly. We've sort of come up in the jam scene, and that's where our hearts have been in a lot of ways. But we don't go off on 15-minute epics. We're actually trying to make the songs shorter as we go. So I would lean more toward the Americana thing than the jam thing. But more than anything, we're definitely about the song."

The "us"-ness of the band comes through in Heavy on the Vine in vivid, funny, touching, and hummable spades. The opening "Slippery Road" playfully examines the fine line of moderation between inebriation and sobriety, a subject familiar to most of Montbleau's contemporaries and more than a few non-musicians. "Carry," the purest love song Montbleau has written, is in demand as a wedding song by some romantics who've heard it being road-tested. "Fix Your Wings" deals with damage and healing in relationships, with tight gospel harmonies adding to the surprisingly sprightly feel. Both the rocking "Here at All" and the '20s-styled "Stay" address the itinerant musician's thwarted impulse to settle in one place for more than one night at a time. An admirer of Paul Simon, Montbleau reaches some of his greatest lyrical heights in "Straw in the Wind," which asks, "Wouldn't it be nice . . . if you could reconcile the smile you want to feel with the one that you show?"

"For the song 'More and More and More' we had done another weirder version in the studio with a strange old synthesizer. But Martin said, 'We need to try a Rolling-Stones-in-Nashville country version of this,' with an untuned piano they had in the studio. And it turned out great."

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