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A wise individual once said that when you don't know what to do, perhaps it's best to do nothing at all.

Whether he knows it or not, singer-songwriter Sam Quinn took that suggestion to heart last year after the demise of his band the everybodyfields. He and long-time partner Jill Andrews — who met as counselors at Camp Wesley Woods, here in Blount County — called it quits during recording sessions for a new album, a follow-up to 2007's “Nothing Is Okay.”

Andrews was pregnant and already looking ahead to a solo career. Quinn, on the other hand, wasn't sure he wanted to continue with music at all.

“I didn't really know if I wanted to do it anymore, so I had to check myself a little bit,” Quinn told The Daily Times during a recent phone interview. “I had to ask myself — why am I doing this? Do I like doing this? Is it fun for me? I was just fatigued on many points along the spectrum, and at the time, I didn't know.

“As it turns out, I just needed a little time off. We had been cracking it pretty hard, and when the everybodyfields was over, I didn't really want to hop in to something brand new. I just had to take a little sabbatical, as they say, and now I've got this thing done, and I think it's a good time for it. If I'd done this right at the end of the other band, I really wouldn't have felt it. I wasn't ready.”

“This thing” is Quinn's new solo album, “The Fake That Sunk a Thousand Ships,” released this week on Ramseur Records and celebrated with a show on Friday (May 14) at The Square Room in Knoxville. Sonically, it's not a drastic departure from his work with the everybodyfields; lyrically, it's an intensely dark and emotional journey that Quinn undertook to get out some of the pain he's carried around for so long.

He's not specific about its causes — his past relationship with Andrews, which ended five years before their band did ... his childhood ... his present. The thing is that the specifics don't matter. What matters is that the hurt is thrown all over “The Fake,” as if Quinn did his best PETA member impersonation and doused the CD with a bucket of fake blood.

“I'm not gonna say they're exorcisms; it's just easier to be blatantly honest in a song,” Quinn said. “I'm not really one to talk about my feelings. If we were just hanging out, I probably wouldn't talk to you about how I feel. But a lot of the themes on this record are things that really kind of dug deep and hurt me on a lot of levels. And I kind of wrote through it a little bit, and it stopped being as big on some of the stuff.

“I was just being honest, and the severity of the honesty, sometimes, still gets me. I listened to the record not long ago, and it still affects me. The things that upset me when I was making those tunes, listening to them took me right back there and made me feel like (crap). And that's what I'd call a job well done.”

He chuckles, freely admitting that he “leans toward the melancholy side of things.” That, however, was a key factor in what attracted fans to the everybodyfields in the first place — Quinn and Andrews had a way of making ache sound so beautiful.

While at Wesley Woods, Quinn and Andrews bonded over music, and when they returned to Johnson City, they began writing songs together. After a brief falling-out, they reunited when Quinn saw Andrews performing with another musician and invited himself into the fold.

They released their first album in the summer of 2004 — “Halfway There: Electricity and the South,” which showcased their multi-instrumental skills and harmonies, a rootsy blend of country and Americana that's vaguely reminiscent of the ethereal, exquisite songs of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. “Plague of Dreams” followed, and shortly after “Nothing Is Okay” was released, the group relocated to Knoxville. After last year's breakup, however, Quinn left town for Charlotte, N.C.

“I was there for five months or so, getting my head on straight,” he said. “In theory, I was supposed to be running away from the winter, but it just kind of got everybody this (past) year, I guess.”

Eventually, he partnered with former everybodyfields keyboardist (and Blount County boy) Josh Oliver, putting together a backing band he dubbed Japan Ten. And he set to work on a new set of songs, some dating to those last everybodyfields sessions.

“I worked hard on it, and some of the work was even fun,” he said. “So many times when records are made, it's by people in a room where there's zero fun happening, and it shows — it sounds exactly like people in a room not having any fun. True, it is work, but it doesn't have to be terrible. So this one I just booked studio time and had a very relaxed type of session.

“I went swimming a lot, ate a lot of Mexican food and drank some beers. A lot of the songs were tunes that hadn't been taught to anybody yet, and in hindsight I probably should have taught the players before they got in there — it would have saved me money — but I wanted to catch the immediacy of people hearing these songs for the first time and getting their first responses to them.”

At first, the dour nature of the music — anchored, as always, by Quinn's wavering vocals and deliberate delivery — made him second-guess the album. Would it find a niche, or would it come across as so over-the-top that fans would dismiss the record as music to accompany a wrist-slitting session?

In the end, he took his chances.

“I said, ‘OK, this is stuff that's bothering me, so I might as well do it,'” he said. “They aren't songs about making meth or booze or whatever; it's just stuff. Sadness is ... universal, man. Everybody just understands. We were trying to make the music give sort of the same vibe and say the same things as the words do. We wanted to link them up and really flush out an emotion, to create this weepy and twangy soundscape. I'm pretty happy with it.”

And while the album is sad — depressing, even — Quinn himself is not. He recently moved back to East Tennessee and shaved that gargantuan beard — which he claimed to have grown in order to sit for a humorous driver's license picture. (In the end, he said, “it was like having a pair of sweatpants on my face.”) He's not what you'd call happy-go-lucky and likely never will be, but revisiting the songs on “The Fake,” as he'll do tonight, doesn't drag him down like they used to.

“It's fun to be inside of those tunes,” he said. “Besides, when I play them, I'm less prone to start crying, because that'll make me look like a wuss. And I don't want to look like a wuss.”