Following the path of his music

Matt Ward pines for the glory days of free-form radio like a veteran of the 1960s -- his new album, “Transistor Radio,” is a highly personal homage to that endangered sensibility -- and the singer-songwriter-guitarist’s musical touchstones include Louis Armstrong and the Carter Family.

So connected is Ward with the currents of last century’s music and its transmission on radio that it’s easy to forget that he’s barely into his 30s.

“My vision of [radio] is very idealistic and romantic and not exactly in reality,” Ward conceded this week, sitting in the upstairs bar at the Troubadour before his headlining performance at the West Hollywood club.

“But even if you compare [radio in] the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to how it is now, I still think it’s a pretty huge difference. I’ve just always romanticized radio as being a human connection with some other person in some faraway booth playing the records that they love and not the ones that they’re getting paid to love. So it is a sort of idealized history, but to me it’s true.”

As for those musical currents he encountered in his childhood radio reveries, well, they aren’t really so distant.

“I feel like the digital age has done something really powerful to people’s minds, because it’s made everything that’s predigital sound ancient,” said Ward, who grew up in Thousand Oaks and now lives in Portland, Ore.

“That’s not how things are in my mind. Analog from the ‘60s and ‘70s is not ancient. I feel like the music of the middle of the century isn’t really that old either. I feel like it was not very long ago that rock ‘n’ roll was born....

“There’s just a sort of amnesia on radio, in popular music and popular culture that I feel lost in. So I guess one of the ways I get myself out of this is by making these records that make some sort of abstract sense.”

From the looks of it, they’re also making some kind of sense to a growing audience. As Ward sipped a bottle of beer and talked in the bar, the showroom below was filling up with fans. “Transistor Radio” is his fourth album, but this is his first headlining tour, and he says all the dates have sold out.

His record sales have been modest by mainstream standards, but his profile in the independent rock world is picking up steam, and he’s affiliated with a label, Merge Records, that has picked up momentum with the breakthrough success of the Canadian band Arcade Fire.

To some degree, his emergence reflects the exposure he’s received through rising indie-rock star Conor Oberst, who has invited Ward to open tours for his band Bright Eyes and enlisted him to play in the group. Ward has also teamed with Oberst and Jim James, the singer from the Kentucky band My Morning Jacket, on a couple of tours they called “Monsters of Folk.”

Ward performs under the slightly cryptic moniker M. Ward and keeps his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. On his records he can often seem like an elusive character, slipping in and out of the shadows of his atmospheric production.

But on stage at the Troubadour, where he was backed by the Portland trio Norfolk & Western, Ward underwent a transformation.

He started in the role of virtuosic folk guitar-picker, then touched on some of the bluesy and Americana-flavored songs from the new album, but it was during a solo segment that Ward asserted his distinctive qualities and established a strong and pure bond with his crowd.

He seemed both larger-than-life and reassuringly intimate as he sang fearlessly about the big things -- mainly love (it will get you in the end, he warned in one song) and death (don’t sweat it, he suggested in a few, such as the jaunty “One Life Away,” which describes the dearly departed listening to the sound of “the living people walking up and down their graves”).

An absorbing, acoustic version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and, later, a piano-driven interpretation of Daniel Johnston’s “Story of an Artist” served as exclamation points to a memorably affirming performance.

“It’s been awesome to get to tour and record with M.,” says My Morning Jacket’s James. “There is something so warm and human and real about the way he relates to music. I feel like it’s one of those things you can’t describe really.... He just is, he just works. There is no need to think about him, you just know he is special and do not question it.”

That it’s all come this far is a continual surprise to Ward. He’s a self-described homebody with a love-hate attitude toward touring, but at the moment he’s enjoying the ride.

“I never really knew that I was going to be doing this for as long as I’ve been doing it,” he said in the bar. “I only started doing music full time in 2000, 2001.”

Before that, Ward made his living by teaching reading to dyslexic kids, and made recordings on a four-track in his basement to give to friends. Howe Gelb, leader of the Tucson band Giant Sand, got wind of Ward and released his first album, then took him on the road. Ward was hooked.

“That was a no-brainer for me,” he said before heading downstairs to sit in with his friends in Norfolk & Western, who were opening the evening with their own set.

“It was my dream to go to Europe on somebody else’s dime. So I got that one, and then it left me with having to come up with other dreams, and I’ve been really, really lucky. It’s been an unexplainable, mysterious journey. It’s a strange thing, music. Because you make it and then you release it into the air like a balloon and it goes wherever it wants to go, and you can either ignore it or choose to follow it,” he said. “I guess I’m still following it.”