A true-blue music lover, David Brookings once worked as a tour guide at Memphis's legendary Sun Studio; he also embarked on a project where he recorded and uploaded covers of 209 Beatles songs in 209 days. That level of immersion in the mechanics of pop and rock comes through in the songcraft he displays on The Maze, the songwriter’s sixth studio album. As the covers project might suggest, Brookings has got some serious power-pop chops, and those come through loud and clear on the agile melodic moves of the tongue-in-cheek ode to an unappreciated artiste ("The Greatest Songwriter No One Ever Heard") and the peppy, handclap-punctuated opener, "If I Don't Make It Back." But he sounds equally comfortable on the casually country-tinged stroll of "Always Be the Same" and the slow-rolling, poignantly piano-laced "I've Got No Game Now," indicating that there's more than one possible path through The Maze.