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Caleb Stine is a tall, thin guy with a big, square beard who smiles quite often. He sits in the courtyard behind the Daily Grind in Fells Point, drinking tea and eating dried fruit out of a bag. He pauses the conversation, munches on some apricots, and gathers his thoughts. And then he talks really fast. "A brakeman is the guy who couples the cars on the train," Stine says. "I think as soon as you start talking about trains you’re alluding to a mythic America. You’re instantly talking about the kind of America that’s in the songs we’re playing."

Stine’s Brakemen are a four-piece band who make music using the simple--or elemental, depending on your point of view--materials of acoustic and electric guitars, drums, and an upright bass. Stine calls their music "Americana," explaining that for him the loaded term "encompasses the fact that it’s not just country, there’s a lot of folk elements and a lot of early rock ’n’ roll elements, but it’s all centered around American themes and American ideas." He’s quick to draw a line in the sand between the Brakemen and a modern Nashville sound "so robotically, diabolically perfect in its song structures," he says. "When I say ‘country’ I’m thinking Johnny Cash, the Louvin Brothers, Hank Williams."

Stine met guitarist Burke Sampson at a fundraiser for a summer camp, appropriately enough around a campfire. Sampson cites Roy Nichols from Merle Haggard’s band and Clarence White from the Byrds as his major influences, as well as Boston guitarist Duke Levine, who first introduced him to the dusty twang he draws on in the Brakemen. Bassist Andrew Stack also plays in experimental noise band Monarch, dark-edged folk group Noble Wake, and, along with the Brakemen’s drummer E.J. Shaull-Thompson, indie-rocker Errant Strike. All the members are in their early 30s; Stack describes his early-20s stint at Boston’s Berklee College of Music as "a serious amount of musical masturbation. The Brakemen is pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum."

"From early on I decided I wanted play music for people, not for other musicians," Stine says in sympathy.

The Brakemen self-released their first album, October 29th, in May, a cycle of songs chronicling long road trips and failed relationships in a very sentimental way. "A lot of ruminating about space and travel," Stine says. In "On Nebraska," Stine sings, "There’s a road through your field/ And a sun on your horizon/ The girl who checked me into this cheap hotel/ Claims you haven’t been treating her well/ Oh Nebraska, how little I know about you." Despite occasionally straying into some heavy-handed emotional territory, the music is warmly accessible, and even breezy at times--especially so on the standout "Diver Blues," which features polyrhythmic fingerpicking equal parts Nick Drake and Mississippi John Hurt.

October 29th sounds like the landscapes the songs evoke, dusty and wind-swept, similar to Beck’s acoustic work stripped of its production gloss, as Stine’s vocals trade melodies back and forth with the instruments. The entire album was recorded in the old Trinity Reformed Church in Hampden last Oct. 29--Stine’s 29th birthday. "Part of the essence of the band was the live feeling of it, was it all happening at once," he says. "So we just wanted to . . . not do overdubs, not try to record a guitar part 100 times till you got it pristine."

But the album doesn’t sound much like the upbeat shows the Brakemen put on regularly at the Waterfront Hotel in Fells Point. "We have to have enough music to play three and four hours, and we just decided to play songs that we really like, and those happen to be country and folk songs," Stine says of the band’s bar gigs, which frequently include covers of songs by Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Elvis Presley, and Woody Guthrie. Honky-tonk music might not seem the most obvious choice for your average Fells Point crowd, and it isn’t hard to tell the Brakemen regulars in the audience. But the goal at the Waterfront is to get everyone in on the call-and-response songs and doing some twirly-whirly dancing, whether they’ve ever owned a country album or not. The Brakemen like playing at the cover-free Waterfront because "it’s hard to find a venue where everyone can come and see you play in Baltimore," Stine says.

The Stoop Storytelling Series at the Creative Alliance is worlds away from the raucousness of the band’s Waterfront shows. The entire audience is seated for one thing, politely watching the Brakemen play between spoken-word performers. But the band still seems totally at home here as Stine sings about "Driving for hours/ On some gorgeous highway that cuts through the mountains" and drinking at Dizzie Issie’s. "One of the amazing things about the style we play [is] it communicates to kids, to old people, to any neighborhood in Baltimore, any class of people we’re playing for," Stine says. "People like it because it’s real and it’s honest."