"I'm a populist. I want to be an entertainer," Franz Nicolay declares. "I have very little sympathy for people, especially in the new music classical world, but also in the indie-rock community that want to make themselves inaccessible to certain types of people. You don't get to pick and choose your audience in that way, and nor should you. Music is meant to be a communal activity and entertainment. If you let yourself get away from that sort of truth, I feel like you're cutting yourself off from the roots of the art form."

Over the years, Nicolay's had plenty of opportunity to entertain. You might know him best as the mustachioed dude who's pounded on the piano in The Hold Steady for the past couple years. Perhaps you recognize him as one of the mass of vaudevillian punks in The World/Inferno Friendship Society. Today, though, he left both of those bands back in Brooklyn, as he sets out in support of his solo debut, Major General (review) (Fistolo). He's left the usual rock-tour operations behind, too. Today, as he speeds toward a date in Milwaukee, he heads toward a stripped-down, two-man show. It's less a traditional rock show as much as it is a post-modern brand of vaudeville, where the ancient style's tilted on its ear, twisted by irony, punk influences and a self-awareness to which the old performers never had access.

Major General slots perfectly into the cabaret punk world in which Nicolay's slimmed-down performances (the first week of his tour, it was a strict one-man operation). Nicolay commands a set that bounces between the punk anthems of "Jeff Penalty" to the gypsy/cabaret/punk hybrid of "Dead Sailors" to a piano number that crosses ivory-tickling balladry with punk's in-your-face immediacy in "Cease-Fire, or Mrs. Norman Maine." It'd be an unpredictable, possibly uneven, set if it wasn't anchored by Nicolay's charisma. Injecting his songs with an over-the-top energy, he solidifies his disparate elements with the natural abilities of a born performer, as he straddles the line between The Hold Steady's barroom classicism and the Society's cabaret excesses. It's the sort of thing born to be pushed onto the stage and enjoyed by a crowd well lubed by alcohol and rock volumes. Think of it as populism at its finest.

A career as an everyman troubadour is hardly what you'd expect from someone with Nicolay's upbringing. Sure, his music with Hold Steady and World/Inferno's helped inspire enough hangovers to cement the keyboardist into the annals of populist legend, but it's a far cry from his musical training. The 31-year-old's roots stretch back into the New York punk world, but also its high-art world as well. A degree in music from New York University, with a double major in jazz performance and classical composition, honed his chops and strengthened his grasp on music theory to places that are worlds away from the typical self-taught garage rocker's rather limited musical lexicon.

With that sort of upbringing, you'd expect Nicolay to be fronting asinine jazz-improv indie-crossover experiments or something. It's not like the modern musical landscape wouldn't bear such dalliances into showy stupidity, either: Everyone from The Mars Volta and Sigur Ros to Animal Collective and Xiu Xiu made too-clever post-rock, prog and experimental sounds the height of fashion in some circles of the underground. If there's anyone suited to join the ranks of elitist snob-rock masses, it's Nicolay.

Despite his well bred pedigree, he's a salt-of-the-earth performer. For all its twists and turns, Major General is as immediate as The Hold Steady's whiskey-rock breakdowns. Nicolay's populist streak's only partially borne from his everyman attitude. He also chalks it up to a healthy psychology that many of his more artistically inaccessible contemporaries just might be lacking.

"It's psychological. A lot of people who get into music are insecure about themselves," he muses. "It's a weird combination of ravening ego and crippling insecurity that you often find. It's a defensive posture. If you're nervous that people aren't going to like you, one of the most successful ways to ensure that is to say 'I don't care if people like me. You know what? I don't want people to like me.' That becomes a sort of anti-performance in its own way. I'm not ashamed to admit that I want people to like me, so that doesn't get in the way of my ravening ego."

With a wry sense of humor like that, how could Nicolay be anything but a man of the people?

Dry, self-deprecating wit isn't the only thing that's kept Nicolay grounded to reality instead of turning into a prog-rock wanker. He also had the benefit of an upbringing in the punk scene to keep him grounded. Moving to New York from rural New Hampshire when he was 17, Nicolay left behind life in a Spartan log cabin, where he grew up without such luxuries as electricity or running water. The leap from the Big Nowhere to the Big Apple didn't slay him with culture-shock. Finding a home in the D.I.Y. underground of the early '90s, he threw together a punk outfit that circulated the city's underground scene "to little acclaim and much frustration," as he tells it.

After five more or less fruitless years steering the ship of an unnamed outfit, he crossed paths with the World/Inferno Friendship Society. The collective's cabaret lineup was a perfect match for his polished keyboard skills -- he also spilled over onto the accordion when the songs called for it -- and the wild, gypsy-punk atmosphere was a natural fit for one who came of age blending the conservatory and the warehouse stage into a single aesthetic.

"Punk was the first big thing that happened to me musically," Nicolay remembers. "That's the first scene that I felt like I was a part of and traveled among and did my first touring in. It's formative. Musically there are other things that predate that in terms of formative influences, but as an aesthetic as a scene as a way to carry yourself in the music world, that was the formative influence."

After assimilating into the embrace of World/Inferno, Nicolay wasn't done. He helped organize a few lower-key projects, most notably the loosely organized Anti-Social Music collective and gypsy-punk instrumentalists Guginol. Still, a back catalog of songs from his days as a punk front man was always sitting on the shelf. Some he repurposed -- the Society added new lyrics for "Only Anarchists Are Pretty" and "Yeah Sapphire" made it onto The Hold Steady's latest album -- others he sat on.

Some of the songs on Major General are tunes rescued from Nicolay's personal back pages. With an estimated hundred or so songs written during his formative years as an unknown rocker, he has plenty of material from which to pluck. The warehouse of songs and stories wasn't just a trick to help cut the songwriting workload for the solo debut, either: It grants the album a depth that balances the earnest tries of an eager songwriter against the schooled and experienced songs of a cabaret-rocking veteran.

"There's an immediacy to the harmonies, chords that I wouldn't write any more," he says of his rediscovered back catalog. "I'd think of it as too simple. That's the kind of songwriting I can't really go back to. I had to rewrite the lyrics, of course, because there's stuff you write when you're 21 that you don't really want to sing when you're 31. Some of them I left completely untouched. There's a vulnerability and an emotional availability that I had then that I couldn't necessarily replicate now. In deference to the younger me who took himself so seriously, I left those alone."

Major General isn't just a blast-from-the-past raid on Nicolay-centric nostalgia, though. The consummate side man makes the effort to step to the front of the stage in an artistic sense as well as a literal one. The solo album's track list features tunes penned in recent years after he once again caught the songwriting bug after concentrating on his side-man duties for so long.

" Just by the virtue of two things, by virtue of having a lot of touring downtime and a lot of emotional upheaval associated with being away from home a lot," Nicolay says, "with not being able to play with World/Inferno as much as I had, adjusting to life changes associated with how successful The Hold Steady had gotten. It just sort of sparked something and I wrote a bunch of new songs."

Punk roots aside, Nicolay's first full-fledged solo album (he previously self-released a set of demos Black Rose Paladins) is a little more esoteric than the three-chords-and-a-dream formula that's worked for so many punk acts. OK, it's a lot more esoteric. Twisting through piano numbers, rockers and whirling-dervish tunes that hint at his love for Eastern European influences that weave through Guginol and the Society,Major General is everything you'd expect from an artist grown in punk's back-to-basics soil who embraced experimentation and eclecticism as he matured. Long story short, don't expect Nicolay's populist streak to translate into simplicity.

"I don't mind writing complicated songs," Nicolay says. "I just know they're not going to work for every band. The Hold Steady just sort of communally doesn't tolerate a lot of harmonic complexity. It's just not going to fly. It won't go anywhere."

Complexity's usually the vice of the sort of self-indulgent, insecure performers that Nicolay speaks of with disdain. It's a songwriting direction that's usually guaranteed to come at the cost of immediacy or accessibility. Complexity, mind you, was the driving force behind the prog-rock abortions that nearly strangled rock music in the early and mid-'70s. Complexity leads to self-absorbed writing. That goes double when complicated tunes spring from the mind of a musician with the benefits of training and education.

Nicolay avoids all those pitfalls on Major General. Chalk some of that up to his punk upbringing, but a load of the album's accessibility springs from a conscious decision to reign in the powers and training that could make a typical Nicolay tune sound too polished, too focused and too sophisticated for the rock'n'roll world. To do so, he turned to dabbling with new instruments as an artistic hurdle for his songwriting to overcome.

"There is the handicap of not being able to get around on them as fluidly, but at the same time, the process of discovery of those instruments leads me to write a bunch of songs and a lot of them turn out to be real simple chord progressions that would never occur to me to write on piano, for example," he explains. "I have so many jazz chords under my hands on piano, it's hard for me to write a I-IV-V song. If I pick up banjo never having playing it before, all of a sudden, all those I-IVs sound new and exciting. It's a way of tricking myself."

The result is a collection of songs that show that the punk "a good musician is a disease" mantra has a lot of leeway built into it, so long as said good musician knows there's an enormous gap between a great performance and a great performer. Nicolay is that kind of musician. Franz Nicolay: songwriter, sideman, solo artist, multi-instrumentalist; not least of which, man of the people.