Timothy Nelson doesn’t care if he feels a little “dirty” saying his music is “pop”.

It wasn’t that long ago pop was a dirty word, used to describe the watered-down tepidness of top 40 radio.

But in recent times young musos raised on endless diets of 12-minute remixes have embraced the craftsmanship of the two-and-a-half-minute song.

“I’m just a massive pop music fan, I love good pop songs,” Nelson told the Herald.

“It’s such a broad term though, so whether it’s seen as uncool probably changes from person to person. That doesn’t bother me much, I just felt that a few years ago we were making music that may have pigeonholed us in that whole folk/alt country sound and I wanted to move things more in a direction where we could do anything we wanted.

“So I call us a pop band because, for one, I just want to write the best pop songs I possibly can at the moment and also, I have the attention span of a fish, so to settle on one specific sound as as a songwriter would feel way too limiting.”

Since Timothy Nelson and the Infidels started out in 2007, the now-six piece outfit has garnered a reputation for jangly power-pop tunes that sound like a blend between the Shins, Beatles, Wilco and Stevie Wonder.

Nelson says after tweaking the line-up over the past few years, he’s finally found the “right” musos to drive the band forward.

“It gets easier to find the right musos the longer you spend playing around town,” he says. “When you’re in high school you just get together with your mates and start making a racket, but somewhere down the line you look around you and realise all your friends now are amazing musicians and forming a band can make you feel like a kid in a candy store sometimes.”

The band is set to release a second album after its highly-successive debut CD, I Know This Now.

Eskimo Joe

Nelson says at first he thought it was a “little dangerous” adding a “seventh cook to the kitchen” when the band snared Joel Quartermain from Eskimo Joe fame to produce the album.

“He gets really involved with the song structure and is just as passionate about this album as we are,” he says.

“I’ve always been fairly stubborn and a bit of a control freak about the tunes but there have been so many moments where it’s like, 3am or something and we’re either frothing over a chord progression in a Bee Gees song or arguing about a key change in another.

“After a while it made sense to make some music together.”

Nelson is taking a break from the studio to play a comfy, lo-fi show with Infidels’ guitarist  Luke Dux at the Fremantle Arts Centre on August 15, as part of its new Gallery Sessions.

Over three nights in August the main gallery will host “highly-intimate, unplugged” shows from some of WA’s leading singer/songwriters.

On August 22 Kill Devil Hills frontman and urban lyricist folkster Brendon Humphries will be joined on stage by multi-instrumentalist and musical gun for hire Todd Pickett.

Rounding off the sessions on August 29, baritone balladeer David Craft from folksy blues and ragtime outfit Big Old Bears teams up with smouldering chanteuse Hayley Beth.

FAC general manager Jim Cathcart says the idea behind the sessions is to bring, “together the experience of music and art”.

“At FAC we like to bring the audience and artists close together and there is nothing more intimate than an acoustic gig—the musicians, the instrument and the audience—so Gallery Sessions really is what FAC is all about.”

Tickets $10 + BF from Oztix and FAC reception or $15 on door if available.