I’ll be out of town for a week in Santa Cruz, Calif. for a friend’s wedding (and trying not to kill myself surfing), but will be posting a few wire features on upcoming acts.

Here is one on Robert Pollard, leader of the now defunct Guided by Voices. The former Dayton schoolteacher, who has released three albums this year alone, plays the Bluebird with the High Strung on Friday.

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Pop auteur guided by creative vision; ’60s British sound and ’50s U.S. politics inspire Pollard

BYLINE: Mark Guarino, Special to The Chicago Sun-Times

Robert Pollard’s music is assembled from the junkyard of his imagination. His visual art, however, is assembled from the junkyard in his living room.

The 50-year-old pop music auteur is best known as the beer-slugging, scissor-kicking, joke-spewing iconoclast fronting Guided by Voices, the Dayton, Ohio, band that started out as a hobby in Pollard’s garage but, once leaked to the world, became one of the most influential cult bands of the last two decades.

Pollard built a 20-year song factory based on his passion for the British Invasion sound, bubblegum pop of the 1960s and prog-rock bands of the following decade. The songs, from riff-driven power pop to scratchy four-track howlers, operate on two levels: tough and mighty rock anthems that sound piped from the floor of a bedroom closet.

Guided by Voices became the emblem of homemade pop, but despite the continued endorsements of bands like Pearl Jam, Weezer and the Strokes, few have ever grasped Pollard’s talent for patching together lyrical snippets and joining them with hooks, a hemorrhage of extremes that together made his music abstract and accessible.

The reason it works, Pollard said, is because he doesn’t approach anything he does as a conventional songwriter. “I consider myself a collage artist,” he said.

That claim is now validated by the publication of Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard (Fantagraphics Books), a 141-page hardcover book collecting more than two decades of Pollard’s collage work, an art form he learned much like a child would: by gluing together images torn from vintage magazines to create unexpected visuals embedded with political undertones and comic jabs.

Although his work has been exhibited in New York City and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, his first public display included the 500 handcrafted cover editions of the 1992 Guided by Voices album “Propeller.” (The vinyl copies fetch $2,000 and up on eBay.)

Pollard’s second life on the visual art circuit has not apparently affected his prodigious musical output.

On Friday, he plays the Bluebird to support “Brown Submarine,” his seventh solo album since 2004, when he retired the Guided by Voices name after a New Year’s Eve show at Chicago’s Metro.

“I just wanted to wrap that all up and tuck it away,” he said of his decision. Despite a pledge to release two albums a year, Pollard said ridding himself of the “burden” of the Guided By Voices name helped him clear his head to create new work.

“I’m never pressed,” he said. “I’m someone who chisels away at things.” Still, he’ll admit: “I’m working on three or four projects at the same time. If I didn’t have this entrepreneurial spirit, I’d probably have to get another job.”

Robert Pollard’s Boston Spaceships, The High Strung

Friday, Bluebird, 2706 Olive Street, $15/ $18