Johnny Marr clearly plays well with others, as evidenced by his days working with Morrissey in the Smiths through collaborative recordings with The The, Modest Mouse and Bernard Sumner in Electronic. But something about Marr’s seemingly endless supply of riffs and figures also suggests a hermetic existence sharing time and space only with his guitar.

Further proof of his collaborative spirit: Marr left the Smiths more than 30 years ago, but didn’t put out a record under his own name until “The Messenger” in 2013. His third album, “Call the Comet,” was released earlier this year, a twitchy and anxiety-riddled science fiction concept album that, naturally, derives its twitchiness and anxiety from the state of the world. Thus “Comet” is a dark listening experience, though hardly a hopeless one. And Marr has found the album shook something loose within him, too. “For the longest time I was fairly ambivalent about touring and playing shows,” he says. “I was so obsessed with the art of making records in my twenties and thirties in the ’80s and ’90s.”

At age 54, Marr has found things have changed. “Right now, when perhaps I ought to be slowing down, I’m enjoying shows more than I ever did. I’ve really found something that I love about playing live. I even prefer it to the studio, which I never thought would happen. I’ve never enjoyed playing this much in my life.”

He took time ahead of his Thursday gig at White Oak Music Hall to talk about his making music with The Smiths and his signature sound.

Q: Just the title, “Call the Comet,” has intrigued me. I can’t tell if the comet is needed for destruction or escape.

A: I’m glad you got the duality of that, so thank you. “Call the Comet” is exactly that. I came up with the phrase as a plea or a clarion call for a reset. So I came up with this science fiction story about these Tracers, which loosely are an evolved version of humanity who come not to whipe us out, but to reset things: ecology, psychology, spirituality. Dark as it is at times, it was very much subconsciously a positive notion. And I hope that feeling runs through the record. It’s just a plea to be kind. I didn’t want to allude too directly to any specific political figures. So I thought more in terms of people like myself.

Q: “Now here they come” is an evocative and engaging first line for an album. It almost doesn’t matter who the “they” ends up being. The anxiety is palpable.

Johnny Marr When: 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11 Where: White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N. Main Details: $35; 713-237-0370, whiteoakmusichall.com

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A: Well, thank you. And that is right, there’s a real duality I was trying to get across there. Often in my songs, they’re sung from a purer viewpoint, an exclusive viewpoint. A lot of “us” and “we.” I don’t know, just this idea of companionship. So I sort of made this assumption that an audience would think it’s about two friends or lovers. But I knew “Rise” would open the record once I wrote those lines. I’ve gotten to where I know a good start to a record when I hear one. I’ve been doing this for a while. (Laughs.) And it fit the story. What you have is two people who have the resolve to rebuild society. That’s what the line is about and what the song is about.

Q: “Bug” is a pretty unnerving tune. The story is full of menace and anxiety and the song is kind of zippy.

A: That song is a direct metaphor for a virus infecting the autoimmune system of society. I don’t know if it’s as common in the United States, but in the U.K. if someone gets sick, a cold or the flu, it’s described as a bug. And it seemed to fit the rise in culture of some uncomfortable anger. I deliberately wrote the music as upbeat, almost a nightclub funk track to dance to. I didn’t want the music to be too earnest. That’s one of the joys of being a songwriter. You can find ways to offset a serious lyric. It doesn’t always come off. But it’s one of the cool things about being a songwriter. It’s particularly that way with a solo record. In the past I was writing what were mostly instrumental records. And then people like Ian McCulloch, Matt Johnson, Bernard (Sumner) and Morrissey would put their words on top. Now I get to play with the whole thing. It’s more work, but like a lot of things if you work harder, they’re more satisfying.

Q: I was just thinking about all these varied but memorable guitar parts you’ve come up with over the years. But there’s still this identifiable tone that runs through all of it. Were there instrumentalists whose tone you particularly admired?

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well I know what you’re talking about and false modesty aside, I think I used to just credit it to playing how I feel. That doesn’t mean it’s what you’d call emotional music or sad music. It can be all kinds of things. But one of those guys, and it’s probably an obvious one, is the Edge. I think he always has a distinctive stamp; you know when it’s him. From the older rock days, Nils Lofgren did that for me as a kid. He played beautifully. Neil Young comes to mind a lot. John McLaughlin. People like that. Really my generation was all about a guy called John McGeouch, from Siouxsie and the Banshees. He was a great player. There’s a lot of others. Freddie Stone from Sly and the Family Stone. Ike Turner. I discovered Hubert Sumlin when I was 18. I could go on and on. But all the people I mentioned were very distinctive. And then people like Bernard Sumner from Joy Division. That’s the thing about Joy Division, it sounded the way Manchester felt at that time. I was a teen in the city at that time. And I think all good music sounds something like its environment, in addition to sounding like the player.

Q: A friend wanted me to ask about the Smiths’ instrumentals. About how something like “Oscillate Wildly” came about. Was it done when Morrissey was busy with something else? Or was he just not able to come up with lyrics for it?

A: To be fair, that song, “Oscillate Wildly,” was Morrissey encouraging me to write an instrumental B side. It was always meant to be an instrumental. As it happened, I’d just moved into a house with a piano, and it was the first tune I played on that piano. I always liked that piece of music. It was, well, there’s that word “emotional” again. But it fits. I think it still sounds good.

Q: Has the process changed for you at all? The Smiths’ songs came so fast, in such a short time. It appears you enjoy collaboration. But there’s also something insular about the way you work.

A: Yeah, I suppose that’s being younger and in a band working every day. All day every day. You don’t really have much time to talk about stuff. You’re just a kid happy to be making a record. At first you just follow your instincts. In my case, those early days with the Smiths, we’d finally gotten this opportunity to form a band and make records. So we did it at a prolific rate. But we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about process. We just wanted to make cool records. And that helped me to just create and create. A lot of it was just being young.

Q: Does being older mean you overthink things?

A: Yeah, maybe. When you start out it feels more like an apprenticeship. But I’m essentially buying into what I bought into at 14, which is thinking that being a rock musician is the greatest thing in the world to be. Forty years later, you realize it’s not all champagne by the pool. Bands break up, and albums don’t sell. There are added complications playing in a band. But I still manage in spite of all those things to not get far off from that original idea. Being a musician is the greatest thing in the world. And that led to this latest record. I’m able to use music as an escape. The “comet” is me trying to escape from everything going on in society. And there was a fair bit of that when I started playing guitar as a kid, too. Wealth and notoriety and all that stuff, are fine. But crafting songs and writing words, that’s something I started out doing on my own. So I went into “Comet” with the same focus. It had nothing to do with a record company or a career move. And doing it that way helped me make the record. It helped the adversity and the whole (expletive) up way culture is at the moment. Maybe that’ll produce some other decent records and good songs.

andrew.dansby@chron.com