It was the late ’70s, or the early ’80s – hip hop was taking off and rock was growing out its hair.

Van Hunt, the neo-soul musician destined to win a Grammy decades later, was in a much smaller incarnation, crawling through the smoky haze of his part-time pimp father’s apartment. Uninterested in the adult goings-on of the place, Hunt was physically stumbling over his father’s records scattered on the floor – records that represented a completely different sound than the hip-hop coming from the stereo down the street.

When he got old enough to listen, it was these records that sent Hunt into his particular place in the modern music world as a man determined to realize the fuzzy analog warmth and approximation of needle on vinyl in a new era with new technology.

The recording tools have leaped forward since the golden days of funk, but Hunt maintains the essential elements in a clearer, crisper, more digital way.

And despite the inevitable modernizations, the style of music was never open to discussion.

“I love the sensuality of the music; I always loved the funk. I don’t hear it from any other era – it evokes something guttural, something I identify with ... people like the Ohio Players,” said Hunt, who won a Grammy in 2006 for his cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” with John Legend and Joss Stone.

It wouldn’t make sense to expect anything linear from funk or soul – the sound lends itself more to a slowly blooming and psychedelic flowering, cultivating the visceral space between beats and reveling in the sounds left unplayed.

It is a theme and not a process, and it is no surprise than Hunt’s path from tripping over records to winning Grammys remained in this vein.

“It wasn’t a procedural thing – like a lot of musicians, I was in many bands. But finding the music made the rest easy. Once you have something that legitimizes your instincts and is already out to the masses, you have a way to put out what you want to express,” Hunt said.

Genre – that is, neo-soul and funk as opposed to hip-hop or rock – isn’t Hunt’s only point of departure from contemporary music. Embracing the craft of songwriting, Hunt sees himself in opposition to the more simplistic musical structures of our day.

Eschewing the repetitive hip-hop beat, or a sample repeated endlessly as a setting for lyrical self-promotion, Hunt wants, at least in his own music, to shift the focus back to the connections between musical structures and human emotions – to evoke something other than the ubiquitous, sweat-lubricated, booty grinding of the club scene, without sacrificing the sensuality.

“There is a constant fight against mediocrity. Many of us roll with the punches, but I battle against the era,” Hunt said.

“The musical culture has been in decline. When you start with Bach and Beethoven, there’s nowhere to go but down. When people play the same chord a thousand times instead of expressing themselves, it does nothing for you.”