Look, Spottiswoode has got it all wrong.

This isn’t typical, by the way. Most of the time his thoughts about music are – sorry about this – “spot on.” And even when they’re not, it’s still a pleasure to hear him go on in that parlor-bred, British accent.

But we were chatting about Building a Road, the sophomore release by Spottiswoode and His Enemies, which consists of seven gifted multi-instrumentalists – the trumpet player doubles on violin, and the guitar player knows his way around the mandolin, steel guitar, Melodica, and, for that dash of rhythmic je ne sais crois, the egg shaker – all dedicated to bringing Spottiswoode’s enigmatic, sometimes outrageous, never predictable music to life.

Great band, great record … yet Spottiswoode was apprehensive about what listeners would make of it. “We might be pigeonholed as an Americana rock/gospel band,” he said, sounding alarmed, as if someone had served day-old scones with his Earl Grey.

Well, let’s put this to rest, right up front. Building a Road is no Americana album. Though the cover art captures some spirit-stirring service in the Deep South – the photo was actually shot in Jamaica, but never mind – the music behind the picture is much more varied than this image suggests. First of all, the opening track is titled “Drunk,” which is about as neo-Biblical as you can get. Then there’s “Play Me in Your Bedroom,” possibly the most conceptually subtle seduction song on record. He’s a slick young innocent on “Youngest Child,” a happily wounded romantic on “I’m in Love with an Angry Girl” … the picture changes from one track to the next. There’s hipster swing, balls-out rock, velvety blues, dreamy atmospherics, a smear of Tom Waits, a hint of XTC, some steamy horn-riff R&B…

You get the idea: This music doesn’t fit into any niche, except for one.

It is, undeniably, unforgettably, pure Spottiswoode.

Which means the following: It is impeccably well written, sophisticated but never too clever for its own good. Ditto for the lyrics, which can be whimsical, ecstatic, ironic, erotic, even downright poetic. It’s sung – or, on a tune like “I’m Back Up,” sung, then spoken, then whispered, then spoken a little louder, and finally shouted over a churchy – ah, there it is, the gospel part – groove.

All this suggests that these fears of being pigeonholed are … well, let’s say misplaced, because “wrong” is a little cold, after all. English gentleman that he is, our hero doesn’t blow up at this suggestion. Instead, he begins explaining why Building a Road, for all its depth and wit and soul, offers just one glimpse into the enigma of Spottiswoode.

First, he is English, London-born, no doubt about it. As if to make this totally clear, his father even abandoned his legal practice to become an Anglican minister. On the other hand, his mother is an American, a North Dakota ex-pat from a family of Norwegian Baptists. This meant several things, the most important being that Jonathan was born with dual citizenship and a somewhat unsettled temperament.

Throughout high school, when he wasn’t in class, Spottiswoode was usually in his room, playing guitar and writing songs. “Americans are a little more restless than most people,” he muses, “and since I wanted to get out of London and go somewhere else to get some illusion of momentum in my life, it made sense to come to America.”

He had his opportunity at the University of Edinburgh, thanks to a student exchange program that allowed him to spend his junior year in Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania. By the time he came back to Scotland to earn his degree in intellectual history, he knew what he had to do: Go to the University of Chicago for a graduate degree and become a tweedy young academic.

“Thank God I didn’t,” he admits, relieved at having dodged that bullet. “I think the ivory tower appealed to me because it was like going back to the womb. Even now I try not to confront the real world, but that would have been a huge mistake.”

Instead, Spottiswoode did the sensible thing: Give up a secure life to become a musician. The idea had been festering for years, even though his early efforts to write original material were, in his words, “terrible. I’d been listening to the Beatles, or Simon & Garfunkel, while all my friends were listening to punk, but I didn’t yet have anything I wanted to express. I had to fall in love, in my early twenties; that gave me some material to work with.”

Spottiswoode set his romantic angst to music first in Philadelphia, then back in Edinburgh, and after that in Washington, DC. For a while he was distracted by notions of filmmaking, but even here it was fundamentally about music: As a member of the Zimmermans, celebrated then and in memory now for their offbeat embrace of folk, punk, and slick lounge music, Spottiswoode directed their videos, two of which won him a Student Emmy Award two years in a row. A short film of his, The Gentleman, played for three years on IFC.

It didn’t take him long to put the lens cap back on his camera. “When the Zimmermans broke up it became obvious I had to move to New York. About six months later it struck me that I was ready to play music again. A lot of the guys from the Zimmermans weren’t that busy, so I asked them to form another band with me. They did, and I got some other guys, and we started to play.”

Surrounded by his Enemies – once described as “an oompah band on crack” - Spottiswoode picked up gigs at places like the Mercury Lounge, the Cooler, and Coney Island High. When they landed a Monday night residency at the Fez, he treated that as a creative challenge: “We’d do theme shows – a cabaret night, a rock night, a gospel night. People would come back to see us because they didn’t know what we would be doing next time.”

An eclectic act, in other words – but this time, it turns out, we got it wrong. “I’ve always hated that term – e-clec-tic,” he says, dropping each syllable like damp socks into the laundry. “To me, it’s about expressing something, be it a story or an emotion. It’s a celebration of songwriting, and that’s the path we followed when we cut our first album.”

That CD, Spottiswoode and His Enemies, was a brilliant jumble, each song pulled from one or another corner of the band’s thematic closet. “It got nice reviews,” Spottiswoode concedes, “but it was a mish-mash of ideas, all thrown together. That got me thinking about the next record, which I wanted to make more coherent and better besides.”

That leads us to Building a Road. It’s brilliant too, and we’re not backing down from our insistence that it’s got plenty of variety, but that coherence is definitely there. Heard from start to finish, it is like a road unfolding. Maybe, for some, the experience leads through the world depicted on the cover and in the inside photos. For others, the trip is different, and these images are more about suggesting a state of mind – particularly meaning and ecstasy that each of us, whether sedate Anglicans or testifying backwoods believers, pursue in our own way.

“I would describe this as a personal record,” Spottiswoode suggests. “These songs are honest – mostly, like journal entries. Maybe it’s an exaggerated honesty.”

Journal entries, that is, with a killer band jamming on each intimate scribble, and a guy out front who isn’t afraid of being silly or soulful, depending on the moment. It’s an album that comes from the heart, the head, and that big, brightly lit stage right in front of you.

In other words, Spottiswoode has got it right after all.