To this point, I’ve been drawn toward calling Michael Wunder’s songwriting “imagistic.” But if you spend time with his few recorded and public songs, lines feverishly blur between whatever style of songwriting you’d say Wunder undertakes and what the lyricism ultimately performs on the listener.

Wunder, a once-Omaha, recently-Lincoln singer-songwriter, moves in the lyrical pattern of an arthouse film or a hypnotist, repeating lines and pictures that, when uttered enough, bend and bend until they sound as if they mean everything. And once Wunder’s fleet fingerpicking has subsided, you’re left wondering if the songs — as units — carried their own water or whether Wunder’s expert picking, throat-clenching voice and your own brain carried it all for them. And entrancing through it all, Wunder’s voice and manner as a performer aren’t particularly forthcoming about whether any of it’s true.

There are moments in songs like “I Look at the Stars” and “I Can Waltz” where the titles and central lines come off like personal mantras that only Wunder really understands. Even the people to whom it seems the narrator so achingly sings may struggle for what they mean. For which the aching only reverberates more.

And all that said, the best way I can introduce Michael is by saying that many, many singer-songwriters will cite Nick Drake as an influence, because it’s a safe and unblemished reference. (I don’t know if Michael has made that citation.) But Wunder is the only one that comes to mind who actually kind of reminds me of Drake, for the songs’ deep and fluttering funeral dances and for the fearfulness packed into every-day words.

You can see Michael Wunder on Thursday at Barley Street Tavern with John Larsen, but right now he joins us live on Hear Nebraska FM. Here is Michael Wunder.

video by Will Stott