Reviving his career was a DIY project

Maybe the stars have aligned for Brendan Benson.

The 34-year-old from Detroit has been a major-label bust, pop star in limbo and scrappy indie phenom. Now, hawking his new album, “The Alternative to Love,” on V2 Records, Benson seems as buoyant as one of his irresistible pop hooks.

“Everything’s finally in place. I have a good manager, I have a good label -- it’s a great feeling,” he says from Birmingham, England, where he is winding up the U.K. leg of a tour that visits the Troubadour on Wednesday.

The album, with its Cars-like bounce, spacey electronics and propulsive guitars supporting Benson’s boyish tenor, sounds almost too textured to be a do-it-yourself project. But the singer recorded “Alternative” in his Motor City home, playing all the instruments himself, before turning it over to Tchad Blake for mixing -- “with the hope he could kind of fix some things,” Benson says. Blake did. And, adds Benson, “I know one thing: I’m retiring from self-producing.”

He is nonetheless proud of what emerged as his third album, a follow-up to 2002’s “Lapalco.” That record, on indie label StarTime International, signaled his reemergence from a couple of years as a side player. Benson’s 1996 debut, “One Mississippi,” earned critical praise, but label problems stalled his career and the album languished.

Also on the shelf is an album he made “a few months ago” with buddy Jack White of the White Stripes. “We mixed it and put it away, because both of us are so busy. It’ll probably come out next year,” Benson says.

How does it sound? “It’s basically our two styles crammed together -- the hard blues rock thing that Jack does and the melodic pop I do,” Benson says. “It was a blast ... the first time I ever really collaborated with anybody from the ground up.”

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-- Kevin Bronson

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Brendan Benson, with Giant Drag, the Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. 8 p.m. Wednesday. $15. (310) 276-6168.