Yves Jean's pretty hard to miss in Pittsburgh's music scene -- you can't walk into just any rock bar around here and see a 6-foot-5 Haitian-American who combines mainstream pop-rock vocals and hooks with his rippling bass and African and Caribbean rhythms. Though you might find Yves himself working the door at Shady Grove -- one of his four jobs, he jokes -- and if you do, it's pronounced "Eve."

The workload is a means to two ends: First, to finance the professional sheen on his new record, for Love and Desperation, and, second, to keep him busy and upbeat in the face of some bleaker times.

Jean got started in Pittsburgh's music scene in the late 1990s, winning the 1999 Graffiti Rock Challenge with the Yves Jean Band, "a nine-piece jam band, basically," he says. "It was a world-beat, eclectic fusiony kind of stuff with great musicians." When the lineup proved too cumbersome for touring, Jean pared it back to a four-piece, and for 2004's Rise Above Your Surroundings, the songs became more concise and indie-rock-oriented. After a year-and-a-half of touring, Jean was primed for another go at the studio when things started to fall apart: He lost his mother, Georgette Jean, who had raised him alone in New York City, to cancer. With his only real family gone, he soon realized, "I'm alone in this motherfucker."