Hopeful Words From a Voice Now Silent

“Hi Josh ... We were blessed with a beautiful snowstorm on Saturday. I love how it makes the city clean and sparkly in the brief moment before it gets brown and slushy. Kinda magical. Your spirit still makes the city more beautiful every day, and unlike snow does not get brown and slushy at all. Can’t wait to hear your voice again. Love, Eden.”

--Message on Josh Clayton-Felt’s Web site near the two-year anniversary of his death

Josh Clayton-Felt’s parting gift--the album he did not know would be a goodbye--will be bestowed upon the listening public this week, more than two years after he died. And while a few fans might get weepy, many he touched will probably smile, light a candle and whip up some banana pancakes, Josh-style.

“Spirit Touches Ground,” due Tuesday from DreamWorks Records, brims with grand metaphor and unrelenting hope, the crisp, tuneful work of a singer-songwriter in full bloom.

Clayton-Felt, a Boston native who lived in L.A., finished mixing the album in mid-December 1999, a week before he was hospitalized and a month before he died of a rare form of cancer at 32. His family gained rights to the album and financed the release, which is being promoted and marketed by a network of volunteers, many of whom worked with him at his former label, A&M.;

“It’s come out just the way he wanted,” Marilyn Felt, his mother, says of the album. “He’d be thrilled.”

That “Spirit” would inspire such a flurry of posthumous activity surprises no one who knew Clayton-Felt, the former School of Fish frontman whose indomitable optimism echoes throughout the album even as he explores the compromises we reach between the spiritual and the secular. Then there are the vocals.

“It was so painful for many of us to listen” to the album, says Laura Baker, Clayton-Felt’s sister. “It was hard to hear his voice, to hear him sound so present.”

Indeed, his crystalline tenor, earnest and honest with its occasional tremolo and funk and folk inflections, dances above guitar, keyboard and horn arrangements with the confidence of a man who knew exactly where he--and his music--was grounded.

It is the kind of voice that, two years later, still elicits conversation from fans on www.joshclayton.com, where the artist recounts not only one of his explorations of Native American culture, but his special recipe for banana pancakes. (It’s the vanilla soy milk.)

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Kevin Bronson is a Times staff writer.