There's a sentence David Ford hears a lot from people who love his music, one he's become resigned to hearing. It's this: "You're the best singer-songwriter no one's ever heard of."

"You know, that's going to be on my tombstone," he says. The 32-year-old from Kent is about to release his third solo album, Let the Hard Times Roll, and he's resigned to this new tag. He'd been a member of the group Easyworld, whose singles regularly grazed the charts, before they split and Ford went solo. "I spent a couple of albums being the next big thing," he says, "and people got wise to that, and then it was, 'You're never going to hear this, but it's quite good.'"

Ford writes intimate, fragile love songs that can wrench tears from your eyes, and he writes hook-filled singalong anthems, too. Watch him singing Go to Hell on YouTube: it's an extraordinary, one-take performance of Ford simultaneously playing acoustic and bass guitar, drums, piano, and backing and lead vocals, thanks to his loop generator. You marvel at a world in which this man is not selling thousands of records.

"I've never been blessed with great attention on the radio, or indeed in the press, but I don't care, really," he says. "It doesn't affect my ability to do my thing. If I mysteriously have a hit record, that'd be great, but that's not the aim, and it never was. I want to make the best records I can, and if that on a mass level reaches a lot of people, it should be a by-product of making a record, rather than the purpose of making the record in the first place."

So we've got that cleared up, but he's taking issue with the singer-songwriter bit of that epitaph. "Of course I sing and I write songs," he says, "but it seems like the brand 'singersongwriter' is a genre, rather than just what you do these days." He cites his biggest influences as Bruce Springsteen ("at his zenith"), Tom Petty and Tom Waits. "They're singer-songwriters, but they're not 'singersongwriters'. Back then, being a solo artist didn't mean you were strapped into a genre that means 'acoustic guitar troubadour'. A small part of what I do is singing songs and playing acoustic guitar, but at the same time I also like to throw scrap metal down the stairs and hit bits of wood against each other, and shout, and distort things, and just try and sonically accompany my ideas. I'm not saying I'm better than people who sing songs with guitars – it's just not what I think I do."

His new album was funded, created, recorded and produced by Ford alone in his home studio. He wrote the songs during the latter part of 2008 when the economy was "hurtling into a ravine"; he wanted to focus on the things that are "recession-proof" and to find beauty and positivity in very difficult circumstances. It might be inspired by the world's financial turmoil, but perhaps, in its message and sense of optimism, there's a touch of Ford's own struggle with the world. "You develop a thick skin being a musician, particularly a musician who's been going as long as I have in a manner some would consider unsuccessful commercially," he says. "It's been very strange these last few years: I've found myself becoming stonier as an individual. I'm much more able to roll with the punches and get over things. Maybe I'm less emotional as a person. Some of the sensitivity may have abated and been replaced with more guts and dirt. But I've always liked guts and dirt."

Let the Hard Times Roll is released on Monday on Magnolia. David Ford plays Koko, London, on 8 July.