Heartache and hard living, in song

Matthew Houck started Phosphorescent in 2000 and has relied on a rotating cast of musicians to flesh out his sound. (Kelly schnetz)

NEW YORK - On a creaky elevator ride to the third floor of an unmarked Brooklyn building last week, a piercing squall of guitars can be heard blaring behind door No. 310.

Inside the rehearsal space, which is as disheveled as the six bearded young men hard at work in snug jeans and cowboy boots, the band Phosphorescent is running through Willie Nelson songs. Except they don't sound like Willie's brand of torch and twang. They're muscular but still gauzy and narcotic, as if strung out to dry.

Phosphorescent is essentially Matthew Houck, a 29-year-old singer-songwriter who started the band in 2000 and has routinely relied on a rotating cast of kindred spirits (Castanets, Jana Hunter) to flesh out his sound.

On this day he and his latest band lineup are getting ready for a tour, which stops at the Middle East Upstairs tonight, in support of a new album. "To Willie" is an homage modeled after Nelson's "To Lefty From Willie," his 1977 tribute album to country star Lefty Frizzell, but Houck steers clear of the obvious choices. No "On the Road Again" or "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain."

Instead, Houck interprets lesser-known material, often plumbing Nelson's most down-and-out tunes. The album opens with "Reasons to Quit," whose first line goes: "Reasons to quit/ The smoke and booze don't do me like before," except Houck swaps the word "smoke" for "coke."

Like Nelson and even Kris Kristofferson, Houck knows and writes about the desolation of life on the road, the loneliness of late nights and heartache, and the consequences of hard living.

"I'd be lying to you if I were to say that drugs and booze haven't had a decent effect on my life," Houck says, declining to elaborate. But his evocative songs, particularly "Cocaine Lights" ("In the morning in the kitchen/ I can hear my own blood clicking/ So I stand there and I listen/ Till the glowing begins"), speak for themselves.

Nearly a decade into Phosphorescent, Houck has established a defined aesthetic. A carpet embroidered with wild horses, a gift from a fan, is tacked to the wall of his rehearsal space. In another corner is a cheerful lion's head, a costume prop (not an actual stuffed one) the band picked up at a rest stop on the road.

Houck is used to his fans identifying him with animals. On "Pride," his 2007 breakthrough album, he has songs titled "Wolves" and "My Dove, My Lamb." "South (of America)," from 2005's "Aw Come Aw Wry," mentions "cows with their mouths filled with tears" and women "long and brown like deer."

"I don't know where it comes from," he says of the animal themes, "but at this point, I am aware of it. Animals have an intrinsic quality that makes it easy to put your feelings onto them. They can represent a whole list of things as metaphors."

The fascination doesn't necessarily stem from his upbringing in Alabama, he says. At 19, he traversed the country as Fillup Shack, a short-lived one-man band, and played in coffeehouses until a promoter from the United Kingdom heard him and invited him to perform overseas. After several years in Athens, Ga., Houck moved to Brooklyn.

He's usually on the road, though, which suits his image as a world-weary ramblin' man. Tall and trim with a nest of messy blond hair and a dark, bushy beard, Houck has become as memorable for his stage persona as for his music. He toured solo in 2005, propping up a creepy little doll onstage during a stop at P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville. The next year he returned with a band, wearing a jacket illuminated by a patchwork of white Christmas lights. The entire evening, cast in a dim glow, was as spectral as the sounds.

Celestial country is as good a way as any to describe Phosphorescent's music. Equal parts folk and indie rock, his songs tend to be vaporous ruminations, which makes sense for a band whose name alludes to the "emission of light without burning or by very slow burning without appreciable heat," as defined by the dictionary.

Houck's voice, whose deep cracks sometimes suggest he's on the verge of tears, has earned him comparisons to Will Oldham and Jim James of My Morning Jacket. He sounds a lot different than those two, though. Houck takes advantage of his vocal tics to create choruses, often looped and layered to woozy proportions, that give the music a majestic, almost elegiac sweep.

Songs such as "The Waves at Night" and "Dead Heart" sound like they're emanating either from a pew or a barroom, though Houck doesn't consider himself a religious person.

"I think the music comes from a spiritual place," he says, "but to me, there's a really large gap between spirituality and religion."

His new album has been out just a few weeks, and Houck says he's already working on the next one, writing a variation on some of his usual themes.

"A lot of the new songs are about being on the road, because that was pretty much my life last year," he says. "But it's a little bit unromantic this time."

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.