There's a show on the Discovery Channel called "Monster Garage" where creative grease monkeys take ordinary cars and transform them into extraordinary machines. If there was ever a Monster Garage for guitars, Junior Brown's famous instrument, the guit-steel, could be featured on the premier episode.

As legend has it, Brown conceived of the double-necked instrument that fuses together a 6-string guitar with a steel guitar during a dream nearly 20 years ago.

"I guess you could call it a dream," Brown explains via phone en route to a gig in San Francisco. "I was half asleep and had the kind of vision you have before you wake up, and you can still remember your dream. In it, I looked down and realized I was playing a double-neck that had the two instruments I enjoy playing - steel and guitar."

After making some inquiries with various custom guitar monster garages, Brown found the right craftsman in his own backyard of Austin, Texas.

"It all fell into place," he says. "I walked into Michael Stevens' shop in Austin and knew immediately he was the guy to do it. He's done a 6-string and a 12-string combination and a 6-string and a bass combination. He was building these weird things for other people, so I knew he was the right guy."

Today, Brown owns three of the instruments and has another on the way. His guit-steels join him on stage nightly for one of the most blistering live shows in country.

They are also prominently featured on Brown's studio albums, including the new release, "Down Home Chrome."

While the new record is not a radical departure in style, it does represent a business departure for Brown as it is his first album for Telarc.

Brown, now 52, parted ways with Curb Records, his recording home for 6 albums spanning a decade.

This switch finds Brown leaving a label containing an impressive country stable including The Judds, Tim McGraw and LeAnn Rimes.

Cleveland-based Telarc, on the other hand, is better known for its blues artists such as Pinetop Perkins, Charlie Musselwhite and Junior Wells. "I think they're just going to take the variety of musical interests that I have - blues being one of them," Brown says.

Although Brown is known primarily as a country artist, as reflected by his Grammy nominations and Country Music Association awards, the reality is that he is an eclectic artist whose music comfortably cross genres without betraying his signature style.

Even though Brown has been playing professionally since the 1960s, it took him several years to launch a career as a solo artist. "I realized that it was important to write my own songs, and I got serious about that in the early 1980s," he says. "I never had my style down until I started writing."

"Usually, when you're writing country songs, they're more lyrically-oriented, so you're going to get a hook line in your head first, like 'My Wife Thinks You're Dead' - something catchy that will usually become the title," Brown explains. "Then the music and the lyrics sort of come together. Your imagination starts running with both at the same time. The other way to go about it is to have a jam around an instrumental idea, and you write lyrics around that."

Brown's style encompasses multiple genres including classic country, rock, surf, Hawaiian, jazz and blues. But rather than seeming unfocused, his albums are always tied together by the recognizable sound of the guit-steel.

"The stuff I like the most is playing the steel guitar," Brown says. "But that's probably what the public likes least about me. They are more into the six-string guitar and the fireworks on that instrument. Others like the songwriting. For me, it's really about the whole package. I really like all of it."

"Down Home Chrome" is more of the stuff that Junior Brown fans have come to expect over the past decade.

The label shift to Telarc has done little to alter the substance of Brown's music - fun songs coupled with fiery guitar work. Interestingly, the dozen tracks (10 originals and 2 covers) on the new release have been floating around Brown's head for a while.

"I had a few songs in my scrap heap that I had written years ago," he says modestly, "I re-wrote a verse here, a verse there. Then there were some more recent things I'd written that I never had a chance to record. I didn't write anything specifically for the album, but I did revamp a lot of songs that I had previously written, but never released."

The album's opening track is the Beach Boys-inspired hot-rod number, "Little Rivi-Airhead." It's also one of the four songs Telarc is pushing for radio play.

"That's kind of a funny song I wrote years ago, and my wife hated it," Brown says. "I threw it in the closet and never went back to it. I thought that some of these stupid lyrics are pretty good. Sometimes the hit off of the album will be the stupidest one, so I won't be afraid to be stupid. It's purposely silly."

Brown is no stranger to humorous songs. "There's a lighthearted approach to songwriting that's really gotten lost in the last 30 or 40 years," he says. "People have gotten scared to cut up a little bit and be lighthearted. I'm not a humor writer. I write a lot of serious stuff, and some of my stuff is half-and-half. A song like 'Honky Tonkin' by Hank Williams isn't a comedy song, but it has lighthearted lyrics."

In that same vein is "Two Rons Don't Make a Right," a humorous mistaken identity love story. "That's a song I wrote in the style of one of my heroes, Ernest Tubb," Brown explains. "It's not a direct copy, but just a suggestion of that style. It's a funny story song I put away years ago. I didn't think it was any good, but I pulled it out and thought it was okay. I wrote a couple new verses for it."

Brown drew inspiration from his father when writing "Where Has All the Money Gone?" He says, "Peter, Paul and Mary had a song called 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' My dad used to make fun of it by singing 'Where Has All the Money Gone?' It always stuck with me, so I wrote a song about a woman spending all of a guy's money."

In addition to his original numbers, Brown included two cover songs that he's always wanted to record. "The Bridge Washed Out" was originally a 1965 country hit for Warner Mack with a steel guitar solo by Lloyd Green. "I had a good time recreating the feel of the music," Brown says.

The other cover on the disc is the Jimi Hendrix classic, "Foxy Lady." The song had been a staple of Brown's live shows for years. "I don't consider myself a Hendrix imitator," he says. "I learned some of his approach, and I've been affected by that. I just do it as a novelty. People like it in the show, so I thought I'd throw it on the album."

Brown's diversity of musical interests is apparent throughout the record which shifts from the spoken-word balladry of "Jimmy Jones" to the jazzy guitar swing of "You Inspire Me."

This eclectic style has been both a creative strength and a business liability for Brown. Over-formatted and compartmentalized country radio has never really known what to do with Brown's music, which incorporates so many varied styles.

"Everybody wants to put you into some kind of compartment," Brown laments. "They describe me as somewhere between Ernest Tubb and Jimi Hendrix. I suppose that's a way to describe what I do, but it's a real over-simplification. I just have to do what I do and not be held back by thinking this kind of radio station won't play me if I do a certain style of tune. I'll always want to play different styles."

When asked about the state of country music today, Brown bristles, "What country music? That's my answer. Find me some country music, and then I'll comment about it. Where is it? If you can show me somebody doing country music, I'll tell you whether I like it or not. I like stations that play old country music, but I don't hear stations today playing anything country, unless you call Alan Jackson country. To me, it's what country music has become, and I guess some people call it country, but I don't."

Brown continues, "I don't want to name any names, but some of these people are good singers, and some are good writers, too. But they don't give anything to a song emotionally. When I hear a song, I want someone pouring out their emotions either by singing or playing. I want to hear someone gush. That's true in Spanish music. There's a lot of corazon or heart. They're not afraid to gush and be romantic. I think that generalizes what is missing today in music."

Brown cites Ricky Skaggs, Ray Price and Little Jimmy Dickens as musicians with whom he'd be proud to perform. "I like artists who have an emotion that's not buried under other things," he says. "If a guy's going to sing to me from his heart, I like it. I don't want to hear him singing about his pickup truck and breaking his voice like Garth Brooks. If a guy does have any heart today, it's buried by all this slick styling that people think music is supposed to sound like. I'd rather hear something really raw and sloppy that has an honest emotion and sentiment that comes through in the music."

Brown is currently touring the United States as part of a three-piece unit promoting the new disc. Even after all these years, he still gets a thrill out of playing live.

"I still like playing for fresh crowds," he says. "I enjoy getting people to come out and see me, and then I'm off to the next town and another crowd. It's not an easy life always running up and down the road on a bus, but we enjoy it."

Much of that thrill comes from the diversity of his fan base, which mimics the diversity of styles Brown performs. "I don't think there is any typical Junior Brown fan," he says. "They're all so different. They're from all walks of life, all age groups, and all racial groups. It's really interesting. I think it has to do with the mixture of music that I do. It brings in a mixture of people, and I like that."