Named after a former narcoleptic bandmate, Luke Steele's Sleepy Jackson has become the latest Aussie music success story.

There are moments in a phone conversation with the Sleepy Jackson's Luke Steele that he teeters on the brink of being indecipherable. Between Steele's heavy accent -- courtesy of his Perth, Australia, upbringing -- and the obvious weariness the Sleepy Jackson frontman is experiencing on his band's first headlining American tour, every fourth or fifth sentence makes Keith Richards seem like Sir Laurence Olivier by comparison.

Considering his recent road-burn, including a number of appearances at this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, it's amazing that Steele's creatively impenetrable speech patterns are even remotely comprehensible.

The place where he has no trouble making himself understood is on stage with the Sleepy Jackson, his incredibly well-received Pop quartet. After a couple of experimentally broad EPs, the Sleepy Jackson's impressive debut full length Lovers, released last summer, has caused critics to namecheck Steele with forefathers like Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne, Ray Davies and Lou Reed. With a range that spans classic Pop, psychedelically glammy Rock, bubbling AltCountry and darkly bouncy Folk, Steele has already made a significant impact at home and is making similar inroads with international audiences.

This current version of the Sleepy Jackson (Steele on vocals/guitar, J Cortez on bass, Jules Cortez on guitar, Malcolm Clark on drums) is the fourth incarnation in the band's tumultuous history. Not surprisingly, the band's sound has mutated since Steele formed the Sleepy Jackson (named for a narcoleptic drummer in a Bluegrass band that Steele was once a member of) more than six years ago.

"It was pretty different when we first started," says Steele. "It was a three-piece and more like a Punk Rock band. It was still Pop music, but it was more like Hendrix as opposed to now where it's more like Lennon."

The band's evolution from then to now has been as much about Steele's personal growth and perspectives regarding his music as the physical make up of the band. "Everyone basically just got sick of hearing feedback all the time, and there was a lot of alcohol always involved, and it started to affect the way I looked at songs being played live," says Steele. "It just got too much."

The biggest crisis in the Sleepy Jackson's history came in 1999 when Steele dissolved the band -- which included his brother Jesse on drums at the time -- on the verge of being signed to a major label. Ultimately, the situation forced Steele into a positive reassessment of his musical ideas and goals. "I cleaned everything up a bit," he says by way of understatement. "It was a mess in the early days, but they were, in a way, the most fun. Every show was just so important. I remember getting a TV from a junkyard and at the end of the set walking onstage pulling this big TV on and just smashing it. I remember smashing a glass and then everyone in the crowd started throwing glasses on the stage. It was something a bit more intense. We were only 18, but it felt like our last days."

Steele had solidified the Sleepy Jackson by 2002's Caffeine in the Morning and Let Your Love Be Love EPs but was still content to experiment with the sound. Although Steele had settled on a discernible Pop sound by the time of last summer's Lovers, the songs on the album represented a number of the band's membership configurations. Nevertheless, Lovers was a hit in Australia and made its way onto more than a few year-end lists here last year, including Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and earned the band opening slots with My Morning Jacket and the Polyphonic Spree. As critics scramble to list the influences bubbling through the Sleepy Jackson's sound, Steele is happy to detail the apparent and perhaps not so apparent influences on his work.

"Aren't as obvious are -- maybe Carole King, James Taylor, Michael Jackson and Jackson Browne," says Steele. "Some of the main ones are like Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney and John Lennon's solo work, Brian Wilson."

Oddly enough, the people that Steele mentions are all songwriters whose stocks in trade have always been not just great songs but well planned and tightly executed arrangements of great songs. And just like his musical heroes (his Bluegrass playing father being among them), Steele thinks about his arrangements simultaneous to the writing process rather than tacking it on at the end as an afterthought.

"My father said you've got three minutes, and that's it," says Steele. "So I guess for our next record there's gonna be more levels. More Abbey Road-like melodies from other songs in different songs. Not just standard Pop songs."