This time, it's personal

Damien Jurado's new songs are about himself

Damien Jurado (center) is touring in support of his new record, ''Caught in the Trees,'' with longtime bandmates Eric Fisher and Jenna Conrad.

Strange as it might seem, Damien Jurado has carved out a nice niche by separating himself from his songs. In one sense, the indie troubadour's approach - dreaming up fictional, fretful characters and telling their troubled stories - is the inverse of the nakedly confessional, self-probing singer-songwriter who picks at wounds and proclaims personal catharsis.

"It's kinda weird because for the most part I don't listen to a lot of sad music," says Jurado, who comes to T.T. the Bear's Place tomorrow night. "I don't even like most singer-songwriters. It's so funny to know I'm lumped into that genre, because the style of music that I play is not something I necessarily like or even enjoy. I'm so separate from what I do onstage or the studio that it just seems like a different coat that I put on. It's not who I am."

Jurado likens what he does to acting - putting on a mask and stepping on stage - and in this regard, the Seattle-based singer's strategy of imagining, and then inhabiting, his subjects is classic storyteller stuff.

"You choose the different characters you want to be and sing about - it doesn't mean they are you, or have anything to do with you," says Jurado, who grew up listening to the punk rock of Sonic Youth and the Melvins and played in local hardcore bands before picking up an acoustic guitar. "It's like Tobey Maguire choosing to play Spider-Man. I have no idea whether Tobey Maguire even grew up liking Spider-Man, but he's perfect for the role. It's sort of the same thing with me - it's something I'm somewhat good at."

The neat division of the personal and professional that had carried him through a string of albums, however, was thrown into chaos as he started to write and record his latest album, "Caught in the Trees." At the time, his first marriage was ending, and by his own admission, his world was falling apart.

"I was going through a lot of crazy stuff in my personal life, and it was when we were touring the last record and things sort of fell apart in my life," Jurado says. "But I wasn't conscious of it until I was doing the vocals for ["Caught"] and I said, 'Oh, this is actually a song about me.' I didn't set out to make a record about me or anything, but it just sort of happened."

"Caught in the Trees," Jurado realizes in retrospect, is the first collection of songs he's written from a factual rather than fictional standpoint, even if the autobiographical nature of some of the songs snuck up on him. When Jurado began recording his vocals for "Dimes" - one of the album's best cuts and a track whose lyrics seem to tell the story of a suitor calling the home of his very married lover - the truth hit him like a hammer.

"The whole song is basically me singing to me," he explains. "I'm placing a call to my ex-wife, asking her, 'Does he [her husband] know me at all'? But I actually didn't make that connection until I was doing that song. I got through the first two verses and I started breaking down and bawling my eyes out."

And on the mournful acoustic dirge "Last Rites," when Jurado sings, "I'm playing for keeps, the characters are real," the moment is powerful and affecting enough on its own. But it becomes even more so when you realize the characters he's singing about are more than merely real this time around: They're him. No wonder, then, that the disc took Jurado, 35, a year to make instead of his customary two weeks.

With a new album and a tour with his close friends and longtime bandmates Jenna Conrad and Eric Fisher in tow, things are once again looking up for this chronicler of tormented souls. The new songs are still hard to sing sometimes, he confesses. But when we speak by phone, Jurado - affable and upbeat, with an engaging manner that stands in contrast to the measured melancholy of his recorded work - is about to get married again. He sounds awfully even-keeled and well-adjusted, actually. Stress-free.

Given his reputation for crafting quietly tumultuous songs about emotional desolation and spurned love, one wonders whether newfound bliss might get in the way of his heavyhearted muse.

"No, I don't think so," Jurado says, brightly brushing away the suggestion. "I have an 8-year-old son, and life's always been great, even when I was married before. I wrote some of my darkest songs around the time my son was born, which was a joyous moment in my life. But when you're in an environment where there are baby toys and your life is full of 'Teletubby' cartoons, the last thing you want to do is watch a happy movie or listen to happy songs. You want to listen to a Slayer record. I think if my life was totally crap, I'd write happier songs."