SHINY OR SHARP: "I like to play things that feel fun for my hands," says Joshua Marcus. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"I started trying to learn to play because none of my friends wanted me to sing for their rock bands," Marcus says. "Which was fine, because looking back on it, I didn't really like the type of music they were playing, anyway."

He picked up guitar for a high school elective and stuck with it. He moved to New Brunswick to attend Rutgers, played with a lot of people and bought a banjo for $100 when a former bandmate switched to hip-hop. Now he runs on instinct: "I like to play things that feel fun for my hands."

With two active bands and a healthy number of collaborations, Marcus, 29, is figuring out how to fit his solo work — the home-recorded, self-released Make Believe is his second solo CD — into an already crowded schedule.

His approach to setting up shows resembles the interplay of instruments on his songs: He weaves projects into his calendar when and where they feel right.

A single week might find him playing Fan of Friends' harmony-rich folk at a Fishtown coffeehouse, Like Moving Insects' soulful rock at a Northern Liberties club and a stripped-down solo set at a West Philly cafe.

Marcus worked at New Brunswick's State Theatre with Tom Bendel, Todd Starlin and Josh Newman, but Like Moving Insects didn't come together until they migrated to Philadelphia.

"Around 2001, a band that I was in had just broken up and I was looking for a change in scenery and lifestyle. I was checking into moving to NYC," says Starlin, the quintet's crooner, over e-mail. "Over some casual musical get-togethers with Josh, I'd bitch about the cost of living there. He was moving to Philly and suggested I check it out, sweetening the deal with the suggestion that if I decided on Philly we'd try putting something together. I did and we did."

After Newman left Like Moving Insects and the band moved away from its acoustic roots, he and Marcus teamed up with another New Brunswick friend, violinist Harmony Thompson, and her sister, cellist Chelsea, in Fan of Friends.

Marcus mostly sticks to banjo and Newman to guitar, and they trade lead and backup vocals with Harmony Thompson. "We love rich harmonies, I think," she says. "That's what makes people cry."

Marcus believes the interplay of voices unlocks something else in the listener. "I like the idea of everybody singing," he says, "because it kind of lends ... to the audience being comfortable with singing."

Make Believe bears Marcus' name, but he reserved space for others to work their magic. Newman and upright bassist Jack Ohly turn in subtle performances on the wistful "Man Threatening Pipe Wrench," while Buried Beds' Eliza Hardy provides soothing vocals and frantic mandolin on "This House or This House." The Thompsons' strings counteract the rain and thunder of "The Calm and the Storm," and Harmony's spoken-sung part fits snugly against that of her sometime bandmate. "I felt a little more careful about doing what he wanted even though he is very willing to hear whatever I want to do," she says. "In the band, if he brings a song to us we will play until we are all happy with our own individual parts and I don't think he has as much of an idea what he wants to hear from us. On the solo stuff, I feel like he has more insight as to what exactly he wants to hear to complement what he's doing."

Collaboration was key from the beginning. Three of Make Believe's eight songs had an early airing in late 2004, when Marcus and Amy Pickard played together at a Rotunda flea market, and those slightly-out-of-sync duets are the record's bones. The melodic, cascading guitar and vocal accompaniment on "Shiny or Sharp Rocks" come from Marcus' former neighbor Larry D. Brown. "That song has so many harmonic and rhythmic possibilities that I decided to wait until the actual time came to record a part before I arranged anything," says Brown, who recently moved to Brooklyn.

Marcus knew Brown would be game for something special. "I know a great handful of musicians," he says. "He's the best fingerpicker I've been in the same room with."

For all its open spaces and back-porch familiarity, Make Believe clocks in at a concise 27 minutes. Marcus prefers whetting the appetite to indulging it.

That straightforward philosophy applied to the recording process, too. Marcus had never played with Ohly before asking him to pitch in, but his instinct was sound: Their woeful duet, "Ooh," closes the disc on a high note. "I think the whole album benefits from a lack of agonizing," Ohly says. "He had some friends come in with their skills and ideas and he synthesized all of those sounds and ideas with some sure feet and a willingness to let things stand. It's not overcooked."

Marcus isn't proprietary about who plays what; it's a given that Fan of Friends will do a couple of songs from his solo album, and if the group wants to do a Like Moving Insects tune, that's fantastic, too. It's a blessing to have so many midwives and foster parents to shape the songs.

"There's no animosity," he says. "It's just, everyone's got different ideas. Everybody invests a lot when they're working on something with you. And so people might have mixed feelings about it. Which is understandable."

But while other songwriters might shelter an arrangement and in the process stunt its growth, Marcus is happy to share. The more voices, the better.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)