A punk for times like these

That Ted Leo is 34 and only now experiencing fame is weird math for an industry obsessed with youth, but that’s where Leo finds himself, seven albums and 15 years after forming his first band. The ordinary indie-rock trajectory of a couple of great records followed by a slow, torturous decline has operated inversely with Leo. With each successive record, he seems to be accumulating more fans and even more accolades.

“It’s definitely surprising,” Leo said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home. “I had already made my peace about five years ago with never getting to the level that I’m at now. I had come to this moment where I thought I’d always be playing for this hard-core group of 20 fans wherever I go.”

Instead, he’s almost omnipresent on the road, playing to crowds who see Leo as a sort of underdog statesman for the liberal left and his music as their soundtrack. “Shake the Sheets,” released in October, solidified his rep as a punk-pop maestro whose moral fiber is as powerful as his melodies.

A fist-pumping, anti-administration purge, its underlying cynicism is masked by consistently perky beats, its overall sound derived from traditional Irish, English punk, D.C. hard-core and other styles rooted in protest. Like “Hearts of Oak,” the 2003 album that picked up the pace on Leo’s steadily gaining career, “Shake the Sheets” has an anthemic quality. But, as with the best politically themed music, its appeal extends well beyond his message.

It’s that message, however, that seems to have cultivated his following, even if Leo rejects the notion that he’s indie rock’s post-9/11 poster boy.

“If you listen to the records I made previous to ‘Hearts of Oak,’ there are always issues to deal with and sing about,” said Leo, whose birthday is, coincidentally, Sept. 11. “It’s just that dealing with a lot of fallout from 9/11, ‘Hearts of Oak’ wound up striking a bigger chord in the listening audience.”

It isn’t unusual for him to spend hours fielding e-mails from “people wanting to talk about how things that I sing about are affecting them,” said Leo, who receives about 100 e-mails each week via www.tedleo.com. “People seem to generally want to talk about more than just, ‘Hey, I like your record.’ ”

It’s getting more and more difficult for Leo to interact so intimately with his fans now that he and his records are getting so much favorable coverage in magazines including Spin, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, but “it remains kind of an important thing to hang on to,” he said. “It’s the way I grew up with punk and hard-core musicians that I wrote letters to in the ‘80s. I would always get a response.”

The oldest son in an Irish-Italian family, Leo began his musical awakening as a preteen growing up in Bloomfield, N.J. His first concert was Adam and the Ants. His favorite records were by rock groups like the Who and Thin Lizzy. By 12, he’d moved on to hip-hop, seeing Run-D.M.C. live and joining a break-dance group.

But it was the music he discovered in high school that stuck -- English punk such as the Clash and the straight-edge hard-core of Fugazi. Loosely informed by the latter, Leo formed Chisel while a student at Notre Dame. Relocating to Washington, D.C., in the early ‘90s, the band developed a strong local following but broke up in 1997 after two records on the independent Gern Blandsten label and band in-fighting over moving to a major.

With Chisel and its major-label courtship ritual over and done, Leo’s decision to embark upon a solo career at 29 was a dicey proposition. Leo was getting a little long in the tooth to continue in light of such moderate success, but he wasn’t ready to give up.

“I originally embarked on a solo career when it was me alone playing as a reaction to that kind of trajectory of band life that I’d been in for a long time because I had and have some really strong ideas about what I wanted to achieve and where I wanted to go and what lines I would and wouldn’t cross,” said Leo, who began his solo life as Ted Leo but now plays and records with his band the Pharmacists.

With his recent success, Leo is again in the position of fielding major-label interest, but he plans to stick with Bay Area indie Lookout Records.

“It was important to me, getting into underground music, to have the artists that I respected not cave in all the time to demands of the market and fashion and whatever,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to be then, and it’s what I want to be now.”

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Susan Carpenter can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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Ted Leo & the Pharmacists

Where: El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Sunday

Price: $15.50

Info: (323) 936-6400 or www.theelrey.com