Bob Schneider

During the summer of 2010, BOB SCHNEIDER and his friend accepted an invitation to cruise around Lake Travis near their home in Austin--an afternoon that unwittingly wound up inspiring the singer and songwriter's latest album, A PERFECT DAY.

"It was a beautiful day, really lovely on the lake," Schneider recalls. "He had his iPod plugged into the speakers on the boat and was playing some songs, and I was like, 'Oh, I'd love to have a CD that I could put in right now that would fit this mood.’ That's where I got the idea to do this album. I wanted to make a CD where you could be hanging out on the lake on a beautiful day and put it in and you're never going to press skip. It's just the right music to play while you're hanging out and enjoying the day with your friends."

And A PERFECT DAY is just that--12 tracks of easy grooving, soulful melodies that sound like sunshine and slip into the ear as smooth as a chilled daiquiri. But, as is typical of Schneider, they're hardly pro-forma, follow-the-dots boat songs; rather, he cuts a wide swatch of music to chill by, from the light, summer groove of the opening track and first single "Let The Light In" to the soulful earthiness of "Honeypot," the ringing ambience of "Everything You Love,” the bouncy pop of "Funcake," the relentless, brassy funk of "Am I Missing Something,” the insistent wiggle of "Hand Me Back My Life" and the loose-lipped-and-limbed, good humor of "Peaches" and "Yeah, I'll Do That Shit."

And also typical of Schneider, elements of darkness seep into these sunny sojourns. "God will destroy everything you love if you live long enough," he declares at one juncture, while at another he notes that "It's too late to think that anything is going to change." And in "Penelope Cruz" he laments that "every day my dreams seem farther and farther away"--although he agrees that wanting "to make a baby with Elizabeth Taylor around 19 and 57" may be a little far-fetched.

Schneider--who recorded A PERFECT DAY in Austin with producer Dwight A Baker--doesn't spend a lot of time trying to analyze and understand this duality, however. "I just write songs," he explains. "I just make up songs and then usually I kind of treat them like poetry. If there's a phrase or a line it that I really like, then I'll end up liking the song.

"Like in that 'Penelope Cruz' song, there's the line 'I want to fall in love like I was falling off the face of the earth.' If I get a line like that on a song, then I'm really happy with the song. But I don't know where that line came from; it's just, like, a gift that dropped into my lap while I was writing. So that's what I'm always shooting for, to get those little sections like that that fall into the songs and make them special for me."