E-Mail This Article to a Friend Brother’s keeper Tommy Stinson’s latest solo shot BY WILL SPITZ

Tommy Stinson has a lot to be excited about these days. The former Replacements bass player’s ambitious Village Gorilla Head, his first proper solo album and his proudest effort, was released last month on Sanctuary. Rykodisc is finally releasing a long-shelved album by Stinson’s post-’Mats band Perfect that was recorded in 1998 as Seven Days a Week and has now been retitled Once, Twice, Three Times a Maybe. And, of course, he played bass on yet another long-delayed project, the perennially overdue Guns N’ Roses album Chinese Democracy, which he says is nearing completion and might actually be released before the year’s end. (We’ll believe it when we see it.) But no matter when the GNR disc finally materializes, Stinson insists it’ll be worth the wait: "There’s some epic stuff on it."

There’s also some epic stuff on Village Gorilla Head, which marks a departure from the trashy power-pop sound the Replacements pioneered and Stinson’s subsequent bands refined. It’s an eclectic album, with moods as diverse as the Dylanesque "Light of Day" and the dark, sprawling title track — a testament to the fact that Stinson has been working on some of these songs on and off for a decade. When I get him on the phone, he’s in Seattle for a couple of days gearing up for his upcoming tour with San Francisco’s Alien Crime Syndicate that’ll hit T.T. the Bear’s Place on Tuesday. He’ll open with an acoustic set and headline with ACS as his backing band, playing material from Village Gorilla Head as well as from the back catalogues of Perfect and his other post-’Mats band, Bash and Pop. The former Minnesotan, who moved to Los Angeles about 10 years ago, is so busy these days that he recently gave up his apartment for sublet and is currently an "upwardly mobile bum with a cell phone," as he puts it.

The solo album came about somewhat unexpectedly. There were no plans for one until his pal Charles "Black Francis" Thompson — who hadn’t yet re-formed the Pixies and was about to embark on an international tour with his band Frank Black and the Catholics — made Stinson an offer he couldn’t refuse. "Last March those guys were going to go to Europe for two months, and Charles let me use his studio and all his gear for nothing. He said, ‘Just keep my guy [house engineer Phillip Broussard] paid and we’re good.’ And I decided at that point, ‘Wow, shit, that’s such a great opportunity.’ So I took what I had in savings and I just decided, ‘Well, I’m going to pay this guy and I’m going to make a record now.’ "

Stinson was used to recording demos in his bedroom, playing all the instruments along to a drum machine. He did much the same thing on the album, playing most of the instruments himself. He also called in a few familiar faces — former Perfect bandmate Gersh and current GNR bandmate Josh Freese, who split the album’s drumming (except for the song "OK," on which Stinson played drums himself). "I had been demo-ing up all these songs over the years as I was writing them on my downtime, whenever I felt inspired. The song ‘Someday,’ I literally wrote that right when I got to LA. I had most of the words and the vocal melody somewhat sorted out, but never quite right. And so what I did was I kind of worked that song up slowly, and then I’d leave it alone. I’d go to something else, and over the years, it’s never kind of worked itself out. It finally worked itself out via me figuring out what the right guitar chords were gonna be. That’s probably my favorite on the record just because I listen to that now, and I just remember how it came together. I’ve held onto that song for 10 years for a reason."

Stinson, who will turn 38 next month, was just 13 when he joined the Replacements at the urging of his half-brother, the late guitarist Bob Stinson. He jokes that his clearest memories of the ’Mats involve "getting hit in the head with speaker cabinets for a lot of years." But it’s evident that Bob, who died in 1995 after years of heavy substance abuse, remains a powerful influence. You can hear it in the dissonant guitar squalls of Village Gorilla’s "Couldn’t Wait." Stinson agrees: "That’s totally my brother coming through my fingers on that one."

Tommy Stinson plays this Tuesday, September 14, at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square; call (617) 492-BEAR.