Afew years ago, Gabriel Gandzjuk followed his dream girl from California to North Carolina.


“Fate brought us together when she was tearing out of town and I followed her,” he says. “I needed a break from California at that time in my life and it worked out. She’s now my wife.”


In addition to finding his true love, Gandzjuk found living in the south a refreshing source of inspiration that helped shape his full-length debut, Invisible Lion. (Friday finds him playing a free show at Pierce Ranch Tasting Room off Cannery Row in New Monterey.)


“When I lived in North Carolina, I’d venture into Tennessee and Georgia often,” he says. “Savannah was a favorite and inspired the song ‘Southern Brass.’”


In it, Gandzjuk sings in a breathy voice reminiscent of the The Strokes and Little Joy’s Fabrizio Moretti while a soft melody peals through a haunting pedal steel in the distance.


Gandzjuk – also an avid photographer and artist – says hearing family stories and observing people also inspires his songwriting.


“I also take my own experiences and make sense of them through song,” he says. “And the multiple creative things I do seem to inspire each other.”


Shortly after moving back to California, fate intervened again for Gandzjuk when he met local musician and founder of 4th Street Records, Adam Zerbe.


“I was selling a guitar and [Zerbe] answered the ad for it,” he explains. “We met and it was an instant connection; we conversed for a good three hours about music and his ideas, which fit what I had in mind for the environment I wanted my music in.”


Gandzjuk and Zerbe also discovered that they had lived on the same street as kids.


“The guitar became irrelevant at that point, but [Zerbe] bought it anyways,” Gandzjuk says. “He’s been the driving force for this record and I have no doubt he will be for the next record.”


Though the young musician just released his debut LP, he’s already written more than 20 new songs and his eager to get back into the studio this winter and begin work on his next record, which he expects to come out sometime in the spring of 2012. 


GABRIEL GANDZJUK plays 8:30pm Friday, Sept. 16, at Pierce Ranch Tasting Room, 499 Wave St., Monterey. Free. 372-8900.