CAVE CREEK – Imagine this. Leonard Cohen’s girlfriend and Tom Waits’ wife are sisters. After a family dinner one Sunday evening, when Tom’s kids have gone to bed, he says, “Hey, Lenny, let’s do one.” They make their way to the studio or garage or wherever it is he makes those wonderful wayward sounds and they start to play. That song might sound a whole lot like “Come On, Come On,” the choice center cut of Gus Brett’s new CD “Orphan of Love.”

In that song, Brett, who has worked with such other obscurity‑haunted luminaries as Richie Havens, Rickie Lee Jones and Leo Kottke, falls deep into the hollow hole of Cohen’s resonance and rasps it right back up to Waits’ gravelly grace to balance the “dumb and blind” and the “robbed and blessed” on “this planet called hell.”

Jump to another “planet” on this CD and you’re smack dab in the middle of Brett’s spooky spoken‑word offering “Nemesis.” Wedged provocatively between the sultry “Closeness” and the lonely “Abandoned,” “Nemesis” rolls out an ethereal litany of reverberated dictums that almost seem culled from Orwell’s “1984” through the microphone of The Great Criswell in the films of Edward Wood, Jr. This is a “song” you hear up the spine. Chilling.         

The title track tells the story of the indefatigable, ever‑loving orphan “left on the battlefield of an empty dinner table” who is able to survive because “the visionless won’t bring me down with all their compromise.” In “Sweet Jesus,” Brett, a Buddhist Zen master, infuses a little faith from his interdisciplinary core, and then, five songs later, kicks in with the raucous, rocking rhythms of the (Cohenesquely titled, though hardly imitative) cut “Fortress of Song” to ratchet up the rock‑n‑roll bona fides of the album.

“Orphan of Love” is an eclectic mix–essentially an acoustic blend of folk, rock and blues–that is not so much a collection (although it was created over a five‑year period) as a journey (taken over a five‑year period) that is unified by a serene sensibility and little slivers of sound. Brett, drawing on his many years as a sound engineer, uses audio interstices throughout the track list to provide the listener with a little of the context of his mind. The 1‑2‑3‑4 countdowns to song starts, the offhand comments in the studio, and even, in the case of “Sing Your Song,” an answering machine voice used as a framing device.

Plugging all the gaps with sound and filling all the songs with life, Gus Brett doesn’t exactly invite pigeonholing. “I try to live the truth and speak the truth as much as possible,” he says. “I’m on the path toward authenticity.”

And that path is now winding away from the Desert Foothills, where he has lived for the past eight years in both Cave Creek and New River. Brett first sets off for Colorado to begin his “Phoenix Rising Tour” to promote the “Orphan of Love” CD, and then, Brett says, “it’s on to the next level. It’s just time for me to leave the desert.”