Almost every pop musician starts out trying to sound like somebody else, and if he's lucky he ends up sounding like nobody but himself. This truism becomes less tenable with the passage of time and the gradual exhaustion of new musical ideas. Even a field as huge as "American folk-rock" is reducible to a handful of artists who have covered everything the field represents.

And then along comes someone like Matt Ward, whose professional moniker is the more literary-sounding M. Ward. In 2000, he released a homemade album with the misleadingly academic title "Duets for Guitars #2," which sold out its initial run of 1,000 copies and entered the realm of legend. (Rare at the time, it's now widely available.) Sounding a bit like Neil Young, a bit like Tom Waits, and commanding a fluid, timeless acoustic-guitar sound, Ward didn't seem imitative at all, though his folk-rockish compositions were hardly new. Fresh, yes. New, no.

"If you play guitar enough and learn other people's songs you just automatically launch your own," he says over the phone from his home in Portland, Ore. Ward's delicate speaking voice sounds nothing like his singing voice, which is full of phlegm and vinegar, like a roadhouse blues singer with his head in the clouds. "It's like a jigsaw puzzle," he continues. "You piece together other people's ideas into whole images that are completely your own."