"I think about 90 percent of this thing has been successful, and I think that's cool ..." Sitting in the living room of his Sunset home, Curley Taylor is taking a break from recording in his home studio. It's a sunny day and Taylor has the front door open allowing the morning sun and sounds of the nearby highway to filter in through a glass door. Suddenly, as he begins to finish his thought about his band, Zydeco Trouble, he is interrupted by the stuttering bark of a siren.

Just up the road, a police car parked on the shoulder has been waiting to catch a speeder. When its sirens squeal into his living room and he is warned about the speed trap, he starts to laugh.

"The good thing is now everybody knows me," he chuckles, saying he just drives by and waves. "I play my music loud, but not extremely loud. It's like, 'Hey, you want to listen to the new stuff?' That's what I'm doing. I'm just trying to listen to it to see if its ready to be released. I want to make sure it's right."

Taylor is set to skirt tickets near and far, as his star is poised to rise. Taylor plans to release his sophomore record as a double CD by the end of November. The first disc, called Free Your Mind, will please fans of his live show and the classic R&B-infused zydeco of his 2003 Country Boy. On "It's Alright," Taylor is joined by his new friend Marc Broussard, who lends his voice and helps Taylor sing about falling in love with Creole and Cajun girls at the club. It's the latest collaboration for the two -- they've joined each other on stage, played in front of the world for VH1's hurricane relief fund-raiser and Taylor appeared in Broussard's "Home" video.

The second disc, however, is an even more aspiring record. Fueled by trying to bring his music to the world, Taylor calls it Close to Midnight and, recorded at a spare bedroom at the house, it is more R. Kelly than Beau Jocque. Close to Midnight is, as Taylor puts it, for a more mature audience and, he says, is for getting in the mood. When he played one of Midnight's selections at a recent show, his wife heard a woman say, "I am gonna make my first baby to that song."

At just 34 Taylor is already a veteran musician. Since forming his own band in 2003 to perform the music from Country Boy, the zydeco circuit has taken notice. Though he doesn't sing in Creole and his voice is smoother than the legends he was influenced by, he plays a live show that's just as fiery and dance inducing. Country Boy, which received airplay on local radio, has sold well, and, as he pointed out before the interruption, it's been a successful year and a half.

"It's not like I'm at the top, but its like I'm in it. I'm in to where people really look at the band as, maybe, the band being one of the top bands," says Taylor before humbly adding, "So I think that's cool."

"I always heard music in the house."

Even without the hair for it, Jude Taylor's family nicknamed him Curley after one of his great-grandfathers. When he was young, his father, also Jude, would sing and play R&B songs on the piano in their house. Jude Taylor (who has sung back-up for and traveled with Buckwheat Zydeco and Clifton Chenier before forming his own Burning Flames band) favored old R&B songs, such as Sam Cooke. Using books as drums, Curley Taylor began to express his musical talent. His parents later invested in a drum set.

At 16, he began traveling with dad's Burning Flames, playing drums and learning about the club life and the zydeco circuit. Early on, he had shown interest in singing but had abandoned it. It wasn't until his voice changed and deepened that he would sing again. After playing with his father, he drummed for CJ Chenier & The Red Hot Louisiana Band.

Even as a young man, Taylor began to think about the long road ahead of him. He realized that it would be hard to retire on the money he was making, and it would be even tougher to go on as a drummer into his later years.

"Yeah the money's cool for now. It's gonna take care of my bills. I'm gonna live comfortably, but I can't retire playing drums," he says. "I don't have 10 years to burn rubber and be doing the same thing locally. It's like I gotta find a way to break out of this."

Now, he looks to make some money and hedge it in investments, adding, "You better have a Plan B ready." Although making a living by gigging and touring, Taylor decided to squeeze a record into his tight schedule. Coming home, doing studio work, then leaving again, he wouldn't hear his material for upwards of three weeks.

A perfectionist, time became his enemy. Wanting the record to be more polished than his live show, details like the way he breathed on a note sent him in for retakes.

"Recording for me is like torture. It never finishes, and I am never satisfied," says Taylor. "It's not because I have money -- because I don't have money -- it's because it's not right."

Going through four or five studios before finishing, the problem was not that it didn't sound good -- but that it didn't sound as it was supposed to sound.

"I know I can do it better. I have to stick with it until I get that sucker right."

Between the start of recording and the release of Country Boy, it took three years to complete. (Now playing by his own schedule, the new album has only taken six months.) By the time he finished Country Boy, Taylor had began playing with Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie.

While driving to the mall one day at lunchtime, a friend called him to say 104.7-FM, normally a slow jam/jazz/funk station, was playing zydeco for an hour.

Taylor scrambled to the studio to get a promotional copy of his album to the disc jockey. Although afraid it was too late, when he got back to his SUV, his song "She's a Liar" and a glowing review by the DJ was hitting the air waves. The title track also would get heavy airplay.

Taylor's plan for Country Boy took a different path than most musicians'. Instead of gigging and building a fan base, Taylor recorded it before playing with his band. To him, it was pretty simple.

Saying that gigging without a song on the radio was a hard, hard road, he wanted Country Boy to generate a name for him before Zydeco Trouble set foot on stage.

"If you don't have a record, nobody knows you. To me, it's like just jamming, or you just going to practice. That's really what it is, 'cause nobody knows you, you don't have bread."

When Taylor talks about his new record, he stresses it is important that it finds the right hands.

"What do you mean to the right people? To the right radios, to the right people that could take zydeco and move it to another spot."

Country Boy did the same.

In the early stages of his career, Leah Simon -- one of the owners of Tsunami Sushi -- had been influential in getting Marc Broussard noticed. One day at her house in Los Angeles, she told Broussard about this CD she had gotten after first hearing Taylor at Hamilton's Club in Lafayette.

"It is a fantastic record. It has pop melodies and catchy hooks. We love it," she writes.

Broussard liked what he heard. "That's when it started. This guy, he's made it, he's really on the rise, and he's digging your material," says Taylor.

One week, Taylor played Wrangler's, and Broussard showed up. Broussard and Taylor met and became fast friends, or as Taylor puts it, "running tight." Broussard offered to help him anyway he could.

Although Taylor did not appear on his record, Carencro, Broussard asked him to be in the video for "Home," playing washboard. He'd also bring him on stage to play at a gig at Downtown's Nitetown. Later, Broussard returned the favor playing a rescheduled Downtown Alive! show with Taylor at Parc Sans Souci. Just weeks before, Broussard had called him to play washboard on "Home" for VH1's Hurricane Katrina benefit. Though it brought him before the world, Taylor is modest about the appearance.

"I have been in this business for so long, you just gonna do what you do when you get there. You here to do what they got you to do, so you just do what you do. We just knocked it out. That's how I see it."

"What I'm trying to do is make zydeco hip."

In today's zydeco, Country Boy keeps pace somewhere around the center stripe. On one shoulder, traditional-minded artists cling to the sounds paved by Clifton Chenier and Boozoo Chavis. Some still sing, at least a song or two, in Creole French. Across the road, contemporary artists have brought zydeco away into a modern super highway, crossing lanes of R&B, funk and rap.

While he counts Buckwheat Zydeco, Beau Jocque and Chenier as influences, Taylor does the same for R. Kelly and Brian McKnight. Taylor doesn't speak Creole, as his parents only spoke a small amount. Country Boy and the zydeco half of the new double bring the music to a place where it is met equally with old R&B influences, summed up in his cover of Sam Cooke's "Another Saturday Night." Taylor's voice belongs more in the R&B camp, similar to a smoother Keith Frank. The new record's lyrics are more the diary of a player. Though married long before the record, Country Boy's songs were more in the "she done me wrong" category.

"Everybody likes turmoil. That's why they make soap operas," says Taylor.

Taylor, citing the huge urban music market, wants to add modern elements to his zydeco and tap in fully with Close to Midnight.

For him, it is what is necessary to break zydeco into mainstream and younger audiences.

"It's not that I'm trying to change zydeco. I'm just doing what I want to do," he says. "This is what I want to do to the extent of what I think is going to work, what I think is going to sell."

Close to Midnight was made completely on a sequencer and keyboard. Here, his zydeco and old R&B influences fall behind to the belly rubbing sounds of R. Kelly. From his keyboard, plugged into an empty, extra bedroom, his voice breathes lines like "Your body's dripping wet/ Let's not waste no time/ 'Cause it's on my mind/ I wanna taste your body wine."

"If we get the people, the young America, to listen and hear what am I doing, I think it could fly," says Taylor. "Not to say it's gonna stay on the top, but I think it has the chance hitting the air to where everybody can listen to it."

He notes some people say he's not playing real zydeco, but he refutes their charges by saying that he's trying to keep it alive.

"If I don't do something to attract a younger audience, when the older people stop coming to the club, because more older people stop coming, if I play some old music the young folks are not gonna come out to listen to it. It is like I need to incorporate something that they are familiar with to where they are gonna dig me. That's the only way we going to break out, by mixing it up with some rap, some R&B, some rock stuff. That's the only way it's going to get there."

In his defense, the music is partially generation gapped. Taylor writes about his own generation and is a product of these times and was raised on modern music as well as zydeco.

"I was thinking about it. I said. 'If I just do the zydeco stuff and I would never do R&B stuff, it would be like I am not being true to what I came up on,'" says Taylor.

"I tell people they used to write songs about going to see their girlfriends in some wagons or a horse and how I'm gonna sound today writing that? Man, ya'll give me some slack."

Nick Pittman is entertainment editor for The Times. Phone him at 289-6300, ext. 610, or e-mail him at nick.pittman@times-ofacadiana.com