Fresh from a six-week nationwide tour playing bass with Brooklyn, N.Y.-based experimental band The Dirty Projectors and well-known Oakland, Calif., band Xiu Xiu, Portsmouth’s own Nat Baldwin is looking forward to spending some quiet time in New England. The upright bassist and singer is moving to Bar Harbor, Maine, for a couple of months to hole up in the woods and write a new batch of material. The move will be a much-anticipated break for Baldwin, who is just finishing work on a new album that will be released this fall.

“The CD I just recorded feels like old songs now,” Baldwin says, sipping a cup of herbal tea in his parents’ living room in Portsmouth. With his stripped-down and truly original mix of bass and vocals, which can be sampled online at www.myspace.com/natbaldwin, Baldwin is one of the few acts from the Seacoast who regularly tours nationally, and his popularity is growing in the indie rock circuit all over the country. A sincere performer with a couple of albums that attest to his studio prowess, he has already started writing new songs. He claims to have no particular writing strategy in mind, though he’s looking to move away from the pop sensibility that embodies the new recording. The thoughtfully composed songs are covered in layers of vocals and sometimes-bowed, sometimes-plucked upright bass. 

“I want to abandon the verse-chorus-verse mentality and leave room for improvisation,” Baldwin says, hearkening back to his roots in experimental music. An active performer at Portsmouth’s Tong, an experimental music night held downstairs at the Muddy River Smokehouse from 2004-05, Baldwin remembers nights of performers doing crazy things like playing vacuum cleaners and bands writing and performing their own movie soundtracks. “The Tong was the best thing Portsmouth has ever had,” he says. “It was amazing.” Baldwin played his first solo show at the Tong, citing the supportive community that evolved around the night. “People could do anything,” he says, and that amount of experimentation has made a big impact on Baldwin’s songwriting.

Baldwin didn’t pick up a bass until age 18, and he started playing electric. After finding his true love in the classical instrument, he says that he doesn’t like to play electric anymore. He did, however, play bass guitar on this last tour with The Dirty Projectors, because that form of the instrument fit better with the Projectors’ electronics-laden style. “I became more comfortable with it,” Baldwin says, “but if it was my choice I would never play it again.” Baldwin is serious about the artistic solo capabilities of an instrument that is often buried in the back of the orchestra pit or on one side of the rock ’n’ roll stage, holding up the low end of the mix without any glory. Part of his success is due not only to the way he can coax any sound he wants out of his bass, but because he sings from his gut like he can’t quite fit his lips around the hugeness of the words. All of the parts mash together to make music that is not only powerful and rugged, but  astonishingly pretty.

Baldwin’s fans are in for a treat with this latest recording. Featuring guitar by Charlie Looker, trumpet by Brett Deschenes, and drums by Will Glass, the recording started off with a bang of 17 straight hours logged on the first day. Baldwin recorded in Dirty Projectors’ front man Dave Longstreth’s living room in Brooklyn, N.Y., staying up until 4 a.m. several times to get it all finished. Recorded by Chris Taylor, who will also mix the record, Baldwin’s latest endeavor promises better production and more confidence with the material than his previous two Broken Sparrow releases, an EP titled “Lights Out” and a full-length album titled “Enter the Winter.” The new recording of the haunting song “Lake Erie” is sure to be the gem of the album with its rolling snare drums and angelic trumpets, as well as the addition of a 12-string guitar. Baldwin says about half of the album’s songs feature this instrumentation. The other half run the gamut from only bass and vocals to using one or two other instruments. The track “De-attached” sounds like a song that could have come off of Baldwin’s freshman attempt “Lights Out,” though his voice and playing have unmistakably matured.

Baldwin toured with the songs for an entire year, and the time spent on the road paid off.

“The songs I just recorded became what they were through playing them,” Baldwin says. “This time, I want that process to come from revision.” To mix it up a little, Baldwin has experimented with writing lyrics first, then music. The different process has already birthed a handful of songs, and more are in the works.   

Most recently, one of Baldwin’s songs was featured on a cell phone company advertisement in England. The company, called Orange UK, heard “Only in My Dreams” on the Internet and contacted Broken Sparrow about using the song.

The ad features a woman walking through a series of dreamlike scenes that are supposed to represent the thoughts and emotions of the person she’s talking to on the other end of the phone line. Baldwin’s sparse bass and vocals are the perfect accompaniment to the surreal commercial.

Even with these strokes of good luck, Baldwin isn’t about to sit back and rest on his laurels. His wandering foot gets to itching if he stays in one place too long. Baldwin wants to take his new style and endeavor on the road with a full band this summer.

“Financially, it doesn’t make sense for me tour with a band,” he says. “But musically it does.”

Baldwin paints houses when he needs extra money, but keeps his expenses low by not having to pay for an apartment while he’s on tour. The Orange UK ad also gave him a little “extra cushion” to live on for a while. To try out the newest songs, Baldwin plans to do a few solo shows and maybe even a short tour later this year. He also has his sights set on touring the UK.

However far away his music takes him, Baldwin will always be dear to Portsmouth’s musical heart.

“Portsmouth’s an awesome stop for people on smaller tours,” he says. “Everyone I’ve set up shows for loves it here.” Moving away permanently might seem like the next logical step, but Baldwin prefers to spend most of his time on the road, not settled in any one place and exposing his music to more and more people with each jaunt. His adventure to Bar Harbor will be slightly more permanent. “Total isolation will hopefully produce something good,” he says.

Whenever Baldwin decides to crawl out of the woods, his audience will be waiting.