BY PETER JONES

Like honest politicians and public radio pitchmen, Xiren likes doing things the hard way. As if achieving success in the competitive music business were too easy a challenge, the distinctively named Cherry Creek artist was compelled to make things more difficult. Rather than deliberately record bad records or failing to bathe regularly, Xiren... well, calls himself Xiren.

'We take one song
and produce it four or five
different ways.'

If you invested a few seconds guessing the correct pronunciation of Xiren, imagine indifferent radio announcers or corporate concert promoters wrapping their easily distracted tonsils around it. How about Xiren (pronounced seer-in) fans milling through the 'S' bin, and, aghast in frustration, winding up buying a Salt-n-Pepa CD instead.
The reasons for the nom de plum are simple, according to the artist Xiren.

"Because I'm Irish," he explains, "I started looking for interesting Irish names, and then I changed the spelling of it, invented a whole mythology behind it and legally changed my middle name. It was like I was inventing a new word for my success."

So far, it hasn't hurt in that effort. Since taking the plunge, Xiren has released two artistically successful CDs, his self-titled debut and the new Bullets and Rainbows. Both demonstrate formidable songwriting talent and instrumental prowess. not to mention the kind of radio friendly polish one seldom hears from an unsigned independent artist. The CDs were recorded in Xiren's home studio in Cherry Creek.

The artist's sound is an agreeable mix of dance music, up tempo pop, lush ballads and cross-cultural undercurrents, all marked by Xiren s distinctive vocals. In a Beatles' White Album-ish way, the eclecticism is refreshing. If one is blasé about a song, he need only wait a few minutes for something completely different. It's like the old advisory about Colorado weather.

Says Xiren of his quasi-variety show, "We take one song and produce it four or five different ways... reggae, dance, electronic... and then we really find the one that works. We actually have an album of extras online with some different versions of some of the songs. When you get the CD, there's a sticker on it that tells you what the Web address is."

The final released version of Bullets and Rainbows is the result of extensive tinkering, not just with Xiren's collaborator and producer Ben Jansen, but with the artist's growing Internet fan base. During the recording process, 30 listeners were invited to join the team via a Web chat room. The focus group listened in on the sessions and offered suggestions in real time.

"We would get feedback and then we'd modify," Xiren explains. "And literally, until the song got approved, it wasn't done. Our consumers know what they want. A lot of the times, they don't know how to express it, but if you get eight responses to a song, what we found is that there was always a common thread between those eight."

While many artists would cringe at that kind of musical democracy, the duo insists that the unique process enhances their creative integrity.

"We're out to evoke something and we aren't always sure what that is," admits Jansen, a founding member of the Boulder

'Our consumers know what they want.'

band Opie Gone Bad.
Adds Xiren, "We never wanted to fool ourselves and pretend that we didn't want to communicate to a million people. We do. (I don't) know how to do that on my own."
Refreshing candor... and refreshing music. Check it out.