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The phone rings, and a pleasant voice picks up:

“Quartjar World Headquarters, how may we help you?”

Uhhh ... I’d like to speak to the president and CEO, please.

“Just a moment!”

There’s a pause, and then the voice is humming. It’s the theme song to “Jeopardy,” perhaps; one of those annoying music-while-you’re-on-hold songs that’s supposed to be soothing but isn’t. After a moment, the voice is back — suspiciously similar, yet deepened and more official-sounding.

“Randall Brown here. How may I help you?”

It’s a joke, of course — a good-natured goof from a guy known around the local music scene for his easygoing demeanor, quirky sense of humor and even more quirky lyrics. Brown (a journalist for a Knoxville daily newspaper) is the mouthpiece of Quartjar, if not its heart and soul. Sure, he’s much too humble to claim all the credit; throughout a recent interview with The Daily Times, he profusely praises his bandmate, drummer Donnie Mahan, as well as the revolving door of bass players that Quartjar has seen come and go during its relatively brief existence.

But it’s the blues-rock riffs, the singing voice that hovers somewhere between a growl and the animated opera singer Giovanni Jones, the offbeat, occasionally skewering and often observational lyrics of Brown that drives Quartjar.

(You know Giovanni Jones — he’s the dude whose head explodes when Bugs Bunny, disguised as maniacal conductor Leopold, has him sing “Figaro” and hold a single note for, like, 10 minutes.)

This week, Quartjar will help kick off HottFest, the annual festival showcasing local bands organized by Superdrag drummer and local producer extraordinaire Don Coffey Jr. This month, the band released “Years of a Monkey,” its debut album. And to top it all off, Brown recently tied the knot and settled down.

All in all, it’s been a pretty good year for a guy who claims to have “stumbled” into entertainment writing and claims both Farragut and Lenoir City as his hometown.

“I grew up shuffling between the two, and I finally ended up spending most of my middle and high school years at Farragut before busting out back in 1986,” Brown said. “I did what a lot of kids from there do — I grew up and moved away ... to Knoxville, 20 miles down the road, where I got a degree in English and ended up writing entertainment. At the time, a guy who’s still a friend of mine was supposed to be the entertainment editor at The Daily Beacon, but he got a job off-campus and bailed at the last minute.

“They knew I had been writing some stuff, so they called me up and said, ‘Hey, would you like to be entertainment editor? And can you help us put out a newspaper in two days?’ And I’ve been maintaining entertainment calendars for various entities ever since.”

Brown’s ties to the music scene, however, date back even further. He started playing guitar, he said, because of his love for KISS.

“I really wanted to fulfill my fifth-grade fantasy of starting the band KISS II, because for some reason, no one had ever called a band that,” Brown deadpanned. “At the time, I figured everybody had a similar idea because I really loved KISS. Therefore, I was fully prepared to start KISS III, KISS IV, even KISS X.”

Although he never played in a KISS cover band, he did spend some time in several area outfits still mentioned occasionally by long-time local scenesters — Charlie Brown on Acid being his first, named after a claymation film he and a bass-playing friend made in a high school art class. Although the band never played with the same drummer twice during its first few gigs, the guys did play at various venues, including Cityside Cafe on downtown Knoxville’s Market Square and at various warehouse concerts the guys helped organize.

“That was back in the day before they used the term DIY (do it yourself), but we were definitely doing it DIY, because we didn’t know what else to do,” Brown said. “We were underage at first, so we couldn’t just go up to a place and say, ‘Let us play.’ It was literally the classic, ‘Let’s put on a show,’ and we just found a place and did it.”

Those impromptu gigs became known around the scene as “Dada Fests,” but Charlie Brown on Acid didn’t last long. In college, bands came and went — there was The Aberrants (which included Quartjar drummer Mahan) ... Tonite! Nude Girls, which Brown describes as “pre-grunge” (“If we had lasted longer, we probably would have made a little bit of a name for ourselves as a grungy band,” he said) ... Dick in Jane ... Head Cleaner, which became Darlene (and featured Bill Warden, now in the local outfit Black Sarah) ... and Torture Kitty, which included Teenage Love13 bassist John Sewell.

Unfortunately, the band fired Brown.

“It was something to do with the quality of my bass amp and my hesitance to upgrade; plus, they were getting ready to go to the proverbial next level, and I wasn’t,” he said. “So I got a job at Disc Exchange until the retail world made me start hating people.”

(Again with the jokes. Clarification: Randall Brown doesn’t hate people. In fact, he’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.)

Exposure to tons of new music at Disc Exchange broadened his palette, however, and Brown found himself drawn to more roots-oriented Americana and indie rock. He dabbled with acoustic guitar songwriting, which tapped into the English degree he had obtained at the University of Tennessee.

“That got me a lot of songs that were a lot wordier than the minimalist punk I had been working on for years, but that brought on another challenge — remembering all those words you wrote,” he said. “But seriously, words are very important to me. I don’t really feel like I’ve done something with a song unless you can interpret it at least two ways, and I guess I can be cagey sometimes about which one I meant.

“With the English degree, I started hanging out on the spoken word and the slam poetry scene, and that helped. I feel like I think a lot about what goes into the words. I feel like more of a wordsmith than a guitarist most of the time.”

After several years, Brown had a handful of what’s been described as “quirky, literate blues-rock,” and he sought a band to help translate it to a live setting. He started the New Randall Brown Quartet (even the name was a joke, given that the group played most shows as a trio and had nothing to do with jazz as the moniker might insinuate). One day, when making up some gig posters, Brown swapped “Quartjar” for “Quartet.” Wanting to take his own name out of the equation, he shortened it simply to Quartjar. Mahan was back on board, and with his hard-rock approach to drumming behind him, Brown figures he’s hit on the formula for which he’s been searching.

“Donnie kind of applied the hard-rock drummer thing to the bluesy, singer-songwriter milieu, and I’m really happy with what I feel is some straight rock ‘n’ roll with what I hope are clever lyrics,” he said. “I can’t stress enough how much Donnie is the solid other half of the core of Quartjar. His drumming is very signature, and for the sound of this album, his participation has been key.

“There aren’t a lot of drummers who, to me, really take to heart what every instrument in the band is doing and what every piece of a song is doing. But Donnie does, and that’s part of what makes it work so well.”