[Editor’s Note: Mutual Benefit plays tonight at The Waiting Room with Ricky Eat Acid. Tickets are available here for $10.]

* * *

Calling Mutual Benefit’s folk music “patient” says a great deal about how its pretty languidity can play out in a listener’s mind, but little about how the music is conceived.

For one, Jordan Lee — ringleader and songwriter for New York-based and lineup-flexible project — says “patient” is a kindly way of construing what he looks at as his obsessive creative behavior. He moves on from ideas quickly, even if, eventually, the accruement of keys, strings and myriad percussion all integrate horizontally in the songs, never piling up.

But the songs also lack what people might conceive as a songwriter’s core. But, then, Lee’s journey as a musician, moving from Ohio to Austin to Boston to St. Louis to New York has never prized centrality. The lineup for Mutual Benefit is likewise free-floating.

“The rarest thing is for it to already have chords and a structure,” Lee says.

So when critics call Mutual Benefit “baroque,” it’s more than than a fanciful genre exercise. Lee’s songs are rooted in imagination and abstraction. The result is often organically flowery.

For instance, the closing track from Mutual Benefit’s critically acclaimed 2013 album Love’s Crushing Diamond, “Strong Swimmer,” wouldn’t work as a pictorial and emotional journey were its ornateness not also functional. A song about combatting a tide of depression, the violin appears to stand in for the running water’s constant and unknowable sweep. The percussion of the guitar and piano underneath, while harmonious, add tension, building a human’s rhythm in a rhythmless flow.

Lee says he was virtually stuck on the song until he found the banjo to have the perfect picking pattern for the feeling of swimming against a river. He cites Nick Drake’s “River Man” from Five Leaves Left as a kindred and influential example, where image and sonic execution are one.

Still, Mutual Benefit’s songs are more Van Gogh and Monet than portraiture. Like Drake’s full records, Love’s Crushing Diamond feels broadly unified, a concept album where the concept seems to be the full range of human emotions.

“I like albums that fit together in a loose thematic way,” Lee says. “There’s all different types of songwriters, but I’ve never been able to get into albums that just feel like 14 different songs.”

Most affirming for that sentiment is one of the record’s only songs, “Statue of a Man,” that considers thematic departure toward Americana, but then returns to the album’s ozone of love as healing.

It begins with banjo plucking through and Lee’s falsetto (and drooping chest voice) lilting about taking a train through the Midwest. To be fair, he’s not averse to the folk-classical subject matter. Lee says Alan Lomax’s turn-of-the-century folk libraries are regular fixtures on Mutual Benefit’s touring van stereo.

“I was actually a little scared of going into traveling train song imagery because it felt disingenuous,” Lee says. “I feel like a lot of young songwriters appropriate certain romantic imagery. I was kind of afraid of being seen as doing that. But I literally wrote that song on a train through the Midwest [laughs]. It was hard to think about anything else.”

Perhaps another way of framing Mutual Benefit’s lyrics is how Lee frames life itself in “Statue of a Man.” Intellect vs. instinct.

“… and to say goodbye / makes a mess of all my thoughts / it makes me wish for eloquence / when it’s love that’s all I’ve got.”

“A lot of the stuff that people seem to connect to [on Love’s Crushing Diamond], I was doing on a subconscious level,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking too hard about the congruity between all of the songs.”

Lee is a journal keeper and a morning writer, and the songs land with the calm assuredness of a veteran poet who’s been to the depths of consciousness and returned with fledgling maps of his dreams, all continents and no coordinates. As with writers, from Ted Kooser to Hemingway, writing in the morning is a matter of freshness and closeness to the subconscious for Lee.

So it could be worth jotting down what you feel at the dawn of Mutual Benefit’s show at The Waiting Room tonight, feelings about life in the macro that could be deferred (or killed) by car ignitions, email alerts and advertisements moments afterward.

“[Morning writing] is a good way to connect to feelings that you ignore throughout your day,” Lee says. “I can look back through the pages and see certain things that I talk about every day, but had no idea I thought about so much.”