he leaves whisper so eagerly,” the troubled misfit Mortiz says in Frank Wedekind’s salacious tale of teenage debauchery, Spring Awakening. For Chris Garneau, former participant in the much-lauded Broadway revival of Wedekind’s play, there’s not a better sentence that encapsulates his debut, Music for Tourists.

Autumnal in mood and brimming with youth, Garneau melodiously whispers his way through delicate ballad after delicate ballad. Anyone familiar with the recent “indie rawk” treatment of “Spring Awakening” will understand why Garneau, who played Lammemeier, exited stage left. The Duncan Shiek-penned score (on board for Music for Tourists as producer) is described as voluminous and powerfully kinetic—everything Garneau’s album isn’t.

Which is how it should be, really. Under a crush of layered instrumentation and rock histrionics, the wistful Garneau would never be allowed to breathe. Music for Tourists is delightfully sparse (piano supplemented by occasional cello) and features enough space for immediate introspection. It quietly evokes Pink Moon-era Nick Drake, another singer-songwriter with an alluring, fragile presence.

The austere tranquility also puts the focus upon Garneau’s un-Broadway-like, feathery voice and his tender, poet’s heart (Elliott Smith is a big influence). Sounding like a fey little brother of Momus, he weaves common themes into his cryptic lyrics: coming to grips with mortality, self-doubt, and his struggles with vice and personal alienation. He even has a ballad dedicated to a day of the week pop stars wildly consecrate: “Saturday” finds Garneau crooning, “If I don’t black out / I’ll keep you inside me / I can’t promise you anything.”

“Black and Blue” beautifully opens with a pining piano melody, which isn’t heard again, heightening the song’s pathos—“I want to catch my death of cold / Because I’m scared I’m growing old.” But Garneau isn’t one to bear his misfortune with total equanimity, as he bawls his way through a tension-releasing chorus. Chris Martin wishes he could pen a piano ballad this raw.

One believes this is a personal journey with Garneau thanks to the amount of emotion his voice betrays. He doesn’t properly enunciate words, letting them drift listlessly from his lips, sounding every bit like a man at the end of his rope. On songs like the mewly “Relief” he’s cotton-mouthed during the choruses, love-induced anxiety kicking in as he blushingly compliments a companion.

Garneau doesn’t completely shed his skin, though. The singer-songwriter is gay, but adamant about never using his sexuality as a marketing ploy for his music. Therefore, he only broods along the periphery of the subject, such as in “We Don’t Try,” where he could be describing the taciturn relationship that frequently exists between parents and a child struggling with their sexuality: “And we’ll work everything out / Even all the stuff we don’t talk about.”

Thankfully, the album’s mood isn’t maudlin; Garneau charmingly spins the most banal aspects of everyday existence into whimsy. From “So Far”: “The dishwasher’s on now / Cleaning somehow / The baby bits of Hamburger Helper that dried too soon.” Even the juxtaposition of the album’s title and cover art (a cartoonish drawing of a plane going down) reveals an amusing side.

All in all, Music For Tourists is a graceful debut from an individual who’s not only too tender for raucous rock revivals, but for our harsh world—a world, to quote a line from Wedekind’s play, “full of archangels and millionaires.”