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In high school, Dean Stafford’s theater teacher told him he’d have to choose between acting and playing music. “I was like, ‘That’s not necessarily true.’ I was friends with other musicians and actors who were doing both,” he recalls. “It so happened I got burned out. I just related more to the music world.”

But while Stafford gave up theater years ago, the singer, songwriter and guitarist still manages to do both: His 10-year-old band, Pompeii, plays the kind of sweeping, ethereal rock music that sounds more like a movie soundtrack than an arena concert. Pompeii has placed songs on TV (MTV’s “Teen Mom”), ads (Toyota) and movies (“The Great Mechanical Man,” via personal invitation from producer Jenna Fischer of “The Office”).

“The marriage of music and film together — the older I get, I’m kind of influenced by that. There’s always been this connection in performance,” says Stafford, 30, by phone while driving to his home in Austin, Texas. “There’s no accident that Erik (Johnson), our guitar player, has chosen to be in film — he works in an editing bay doing film projects or TV shows. The moment he joined the band, he helped shape where I would go musically.”

Pompeii’s “LOOM,” which came out in mid-October, opens softly, like a road-trip movie, building from piano, strings and Stafford’s repeated murmur of “for once in your lifetime” into a Nirvana-style crescendo. The album swings between Sigur Ros-style atmospheric music (“Celtic Mist”) to U2-style guitar rock (“Drift”). Its best song, “Blueprint,” has an aerobic energy that matches Stafford’s lyric about “climbing up your staircase.”

“We went in specifically to write a song that was to the point and energetic,” Stafford says of “Blueprint.” “It was great because it was fast — not in the sense of tempo, but fast in the sense of the process. … Whatever you’re going in to record, or be inspired about, that day, it’ll either hit you right there, in big, broad strokes — or (you) spend a bunch of hours trying to shape something that wasn’t that inspired to begin with.”

Pompeii’s method for writing and recording songs can be laborious — one reason the band took six years to put out “LOOM” as the follow-up to “Nothing Happens for a Reason.” The band records long jams, then Stafford labors over the tapes at home, stripping down portions into what he has called “basic blocks on a guitar,” then expands the bits he likes into lyrics and melodies. “You certainly don’t want to slap a song together — you want to spend time on it,” he says. “But you also don’t want to take forever, either.”

Stafford’s performing career began with music. Riding the bus to school, he memorized tunes from cartoons and concocted melodies in his head. He received a guitar for his sixth birthday, and when he was 10, a friend sold him an electric. Stafford learned Nirvana songs from the radio; with Rob Davidson, who would become Pompeii’s drummer, he played talent shows and pool parties.

In high school, he shifted temporarily to theater, landing an acting scholarship from St. Edward’s University, intending to perhaps be a professor. He performed in Pompeii on the side, and after a 2005 South by Southwest show, a small label, Eyeball, offered a record deal. So he drifted away from acting: “I was more preoccupied with going on tour and making a record. I got into the idea of taking your music to the audience — you represent yourself, entirely, in a way you can’t, pretending to be anyone else.”

After two albums, Pompeii split with its label and became engrossed with international touring. The band wrote a couple of songs for a new album, but never seemed quite finished. It wasn’t until the band split the long “Celtic Mist” into three separate tracks that Stafford felt it had hit on the proper tone for what would become “LOOM.” “It is crazy, the amount of time it’s spanned to work on this,” Stafford says. “You think about it in terms of your life, and what you’ve experienced from the time it started to the time you finished. We were getting older at the same time, so things that I was influenced by when I was 19 weren’t necessarily as applicable to where I was at when I was 26.”

With “LOOM” out of the way, Pompeii can focus on less laborious pursuits — like blowing up a car for the upcoming “Blueprint” video. The car was not, in fact, a Car2Go, in which the singer spent years puttering around Austin, until the rent-by-the-hour company’s prices went up and he bought a used Toyota. “We’d probably never be able to ride Car2Go again if that was the case!” he says. “It was an awesome old Honda Accord where we cut off the metal on the top and turned it into a convertible and spray-painted the whole car. There’s all these BMX kids doing tricks around it. I’m really excited.”

onthetown@tribune.com

Twitter @chitribent

When: 9 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave.

Tickets: $8; 773-276-3600 or emptybottle.com