Manchester, England

Christopher Serra

Born 49 years ago in the Ardwick district here, Johnny Marr quickly dived into his lifelong passion for popular music and guitars, forming his first band at age 13 and falling under the sway of local guitar heroes like Billy Duffy. In May 1982, Mr. Marr met Steven Patrick Morrissey at the latter's childhood home in Stretford, which led to the formation of the Smiths, one of rock's greatest and most influential groups of the 1980s.

Though Mr. Marr has been living in Portland, Ore., since 2005, he returned here last year to write and record "The Messenger" (Sire), his first solo album. (He considers "Boomslang," the 2003 disc with the trio Johnny Marr + the Healers, to be a band recording, though he sang and wrote all the tunes.) "The Messenger" reveals Mr. Marr is still close to his roots.

"My songs aren't abstract," he said late last year over tea not far from the Manchester Piccadilly train station. "They're punchy and direct. They're about growing up in towns."

New Wave's energy and its affinity for pop structure also informs "The Messenger," out next week. Mr. Marr goes right at it, kicking off with a blast of alternative rock—surely fans of the Smiths, which Mr. Marr left in 1987, will recognize the chiming, meticulous guitars of "European Me" and the stinging lines of "I Want the Heartbeat." Later, a chugging acoustic guitar serves as the foundation for "New Town Velocity," again much as it did in many arrangements from the Smiths days.

"The Messenger" is retrominded because Mr. Marr is revisiting an infectious sound he created in the 1980s. "Going into this record, coming back to the U.K.," he said, "I wanted to be in a place where I had the notions of what a guitar group should sound like. I wanted my tempos to be up and be urgent." He added that he set out to make a record he could play live. "I didn't want the audience to stand waiting for a minute and a half to get to the point." His U.S. tour kicks off April 11 in Las Vegas.

Mr. Marr said he reviewed his approach to composition before writing "The Messenger." "The things I've done that are most effective are when I get to play the sound of my feelings. Ideas date, but full-on emotion and passion doesn't lose its potency."

His arrangements remain a collection of intricate, interlocking parts. "For the longest time, I perceived records like a stained-glass window or an abstract painting. On a Smiths record, there might be a slogan on top of an emotional mosaic." But by subordinating finely wrought individual components to an overall attack, he realized that an arrangement could add up to something more direct. "It could be a great, straightforward rock 'n' roll punk thing—impressionistic rather than abstract." In "Sun & Moon," several beefy, rasping guitar lines give the rave-up a complexity that doesn't detract from its drive.

As vocalist, Mr. Marr delivers his lines drily and honestly without the controlled hysteria of his former partner, Morrissey. In the brooding "Say Demesne," he moves deftly into a crooning style not unlike Richard Hawley's . He's not interested in conforming to a mainstream standard and was hell-bent on avoiding what he called "the karaoke culture" of "American Idol," "The X Factor" and other programs in which singing is a competition for the mass taste. Those shows, he said, have created a model in which "if you sing loud enough with as much sentimentality as you can muster, you're an effective singer. But it's vacuous," he said. He shook his head in distaste as he reached for his teacup, his chipped nail polish as black as his '80s mop of hair.

But it's the guitars that define "The Messenger." In those gorgeous mosaics that formed the underpinning of the Smiths records, Mr. Marr was shown as a different kind of guitar hero: His brilliance emerged in his gift for the right sound at the right time, rather than blizzards of notes or dramatic gestures. On the new album, he uses a variety of textures, snaking lines and rounded, full-bodied chords as a song warrants. Bright and jangly at its core, his is still an identifiable sound guitarists seek to emulate. Fender now markets a Johnny Marr Jaguar guitar that may help them do it.

Mr. Marr said he long avoided relying on a signature sound. "In my late 20s and 30s, it was my prerogative to be contrary about certain expectations or being labeled and boxed." Working with post-Smiths bands like Modest Mouse or the Cribs, his goal as a guitarist, he said, was to "hide in the shadows, to do something meaningful and expressive."

Now he's embraced his distinctiveness. To do otherwise at his age, he's concluded, is mere stubbornness. "It's the opposite of being open," he said. "You're closed over. When I went to see Television, I didn't want them to sound like Devo. Now if I play something that sounds like me, I don't reject it."

Here in Manchester, Mr. Marr for the most part escapes the hassle of celebrity. Though he sat in plain sight, no one approached him in the restaurant, and as he walked his visitor along backstreets to Manchester Piccadilly, he was stopped only once—by a guitarist who asked him where he could meet like-minded musicians. At the train station, he was recognized, but his fans kept a respectful distance, as if they sensed he was engaged and would be around later anyway.

Life in this city formed his early attitudes about who could connect with his music, he said. "I always assume the people who are generally interested in me are people who are quite like me. It's a friendship across the arts."
