Sizing up the latest release from Second Hand King

Joe Stanziola tells me, with a shy look, that most of his recordings are concept albums. I detect a trace of sheepishness.

“I never mean to write concept albums,” he says. “But Almost Blue happened because I’ve been getting into jazz lately, and I wanted to cover Chet Baker’s ‘Almost Blue,’ but I’m not that great of a singer.” Stanziola laughs at this admission, as though the evidence of his poor singing is obvious — he is a rapper, after all — and continues. “But I kind of liked it, the way it turned out, and I related to it. Then, later, it just kind of morphed into this album about kind of being depressed and kind of dealing with it, and kind of not dealing with it and just making peace with it.” Stanziola pauses again. “It’s not really a happy album.”

Almost Blue, Stanziola’s latest release under his Second Hand King moniker, sees release at the Riot Room on Friday. He is not kidding about his dark and downtrodden theme: Stanziola mentions death in every other song, usually through the voice of his protagonist — a jazz singer, he tells me, who has become disillusioned with his craft and ends up “going pop” to revitalize his career.

The album opens with a brief intro — mournful saxophone notes, Stanziola’s untrained voice sticking to the vowels as he sings his cover of “Almost Blue.” You guys just do not give a fuck, do you? he says bitterly, in character, as a man who is addressing a half-empty room of patrons who don’t care about his music.

It’s a scene, Stanziola says, that is very real to him.

“Part of Almost Blue is kind of detailing those first three years in Kansas City, where I was playing to nobody,” Stanziola says, referring to the period beginning in 2010, when the Overland Park native had just decided to go by Second Hand King. “The first three albums, there was no audience, and I was just releasing music. Promoters hated me because I was playing to no one and I didn’t bring anyone into the room.”

It’s a little different now, Stanziola, now 26, says. His last album, the May-released Before the Bomb Drops — another concept piece, centered on an apocalyptic story — was received well, and he says people are helping him.

“I understand how it works now,” he says, “how albums work and singles work, and what it means to have the right video to come around with them.” Stanziola pauses, taking a sip of coffee from the ceramic mug in his left hand. “I think things have changed because I’m slowly becoming a better person. I’m not such a piece of shit. I still have moments where I’m a definite piece of shit, but I’m more honest with myself now than when I first started.”

Stanziola is recalling his early foray into rap, when he was in high school and just out of it — when he was making what he now calls “shitty gangster rap.”

“It was so far removed from who I am,” he says. “I would smoke weed all the time and start freestyling over tracks. I wanted to be cool and I wasn’t. And I’m still trying to get to a point where I can really be honest. The only way I can be honest now is by writing a concept album, where there are characters and it’s not about me. I can transpose my feelings onto the character.”

Over 11 tracks, Stanziola maps the descent of his protagonist, switching from the swift, purposeful flow he has been perfecting for a decade to the tentative, raw melodies that are new to him. We listen to Stanziola’s jazz singer battle his demons, grapple with his ambitions and face his imagined failures. In “Glass House,” when Stanziola tells us that our leading man “dreams with his head but his heart never makes the connection,” the listener supposes that it is Stanziola himself who has finally learned the difference.

On a rare occasion, the facade falls away. In “November 24, 2014,” over melancholy jazz piano, the rapper gives us an anecdote that could only be about him: I remember when I was in the sixth grade, I didn’t pay attention to race, he spits, bought Fubu and wore it all over the place/Kids would say I tried to act black and didn’t realize that. Later, in the chorus: I wish we could listen to ourselves/We barely know us let alone someone else.

Today, Stanziola is wearing dark denim and a gray V-neck sweater. He has square black-framed glasses, and his hair is neatly parted on the side. He sits on a bar stool in the back office of the Loop KC, the streetwear and sneaker boutique owned in part by Indyground Entertainment founder Steddy P. He looks comfortable in his skin — something, he acknowledges, that it has taken years to achieve.

“Rap and me don’t always get along, but I definitely feel embraced by the rap community here. I feel like I’m a part of things here,” he says. “In other places, it’s different. I played a show in Chicago three months ago, and with rap shows, it’s hit or miss with those crowds. They either really love me or really hate me. In Chicago, there were these two women in front of the stage, and as soon as my beat drops — this energetic, high-functioning thing — these two girls were like, ‘Ugh.'” Stanziola imitates their bored faces. “Part of that’s the crowd in Chicago: You have to be trap or in-your-face rap, and that’s not me.”

Stanziola has no trouble identifying themes or styles that aren’t him — though he is far from closed off.

“I’ve kind of tried to work with rock bands more, but that scene is foreign to me, too. Right now, I’m just trying to find this weird doo-wop rap scene, which doesn’t exist yet.” That, Stanziola adds, is his next move: “I want to write a doo-wop album. I’m still staying in the hip-hop genre, staying in the roots of that, but introducing more singing and more up-tempo notes.”

Finding a place where he fits should be no problem for Stanziola, even if he has to carve out the space himself. Almost Blue, with its songs hopscotching from jazz to rap and back again, has already marked him as an artist capable of blending and stretching genres to his liking. And by the end of the album, his protagonist has made a decisive return to the half-empty jazz room. The track includes a dull hum of overlapping conversations, the clinking of glassware. Stanziola’s character closes with that cover of “Almost Blue,” and his voice seems a little steadier, a little more secure.