The title track of Tim O’Brien’s most recent CD, 2008’s Chameleon, is about one of those shadowy figures you can never really get to know, an enigmatic loner who turns up at the most unusual times. And it’s possible that some of this lyrical conceit is autobiographical—not because O’Brien is particularly unforthcoming, but because his career has landed him in an ever-growing number of odd and interesting situations. From his work with the pioneering newgrass group Hot Rize to a Top-10 country single with Kathy Mattea and sessions with some of Ireland’s most revered instrumentalists, O’Brien has displayed an ability to blend in that would be the envy of his album’s namesake lizard.

Indeed, he notes wryly that his is an eclectic talent. “A little too eclectic,” he says with a laugh, reached at home in Nashville. (Consider, for instance, that in addition to being a fine singer, he’s equally gifted on guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, mandocello, and bouzouki.) But O’Brien’s recent efforts—which include the five-star pairing of Fiddler’s Green and Cornbread Nation, released simultaneously in 2005—show that he’s found a way to contain his diverse impulses by arranging them in conceptual form.

“Sometimes it helps to build the frame first—in a house or a recording project,” he says. “You decide, ‘Well, I kind of want it to be about this big. I want it to be about this loud. I want it to be about this area.’ And once you start putting that in your mind, then it doesn’t take too long before you’re already in the process, even if you haven’t sat down to write anything.”

Fiddler’s Green is a bucolic exploration of O’Brien’s Irish-Appalachian heritage; Cornbread Nation is a funky frolic through various aspects of southern life; Chameleon is the multi-instrumentalist’s take on the solo singer-songwriter genre. Rather worriedly, O’Brien admits that he doesn’t know what shape his next project will take, even though he’s already booked studio time in January and February. “I think it’ll work itself out,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of stuff backlogged.”

He does know, however, what he’ll be doing once the next record’s done. He’s already started work on a song cycle about Wheeling, West Virginia, where he was born in 1954, and that project has been given extra impetus by the death, in October, of his 96-year-old father.

“So now he’s given me the gift of a frame,” O’Brien notes. “It’s one more way to remember him, and to see him in the places and the people round my hometown. At the funeral last weekend they all said, ‘You probably won’t come back around here much, now.’ And I said, ‘Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve got to do.’ I’ve got to take my dad’s old friends out to dinner—and he can’t drive the widows around, so I guess maybe I’ll help out now and again when I go up there.”

A steel town and a transportation hub for two centuries, Wheeling is a great source of stories—some of which have already been tapped by Vancouver-based novelist and part-time musician Keith Maillard, another West Virginia native. Not surprisingly, when I raise the possibility of a collaboration, O’Brien’s already beaten me there.

“I’ve read two of his books, so I thought maybe he could give me a pointer or two. So I got in touch with him and he responded,” he reveals. “We have a lot of common areas of interest, it seems. When he wrote back, he said he had seven banjos or something. I told him this morning I only have four—and I’ve invited him to the gig, so you can invite him in print, if you want to.”

Consider it done.

Tim O’Brien plays St. James Hall on Friday (November 13).