Branching out with new sounds, Frank Turner playing the Blind Pig

In the 10 years since Frank Turner began his recording career, as a member of the British punk band Million Dead, his musical palette has expanded. And since he began his solo career in 2007, he’s also been very prolific. His latest disc, “Tape Deck Heart,” is his sixth release in six years.

When he first went the solo route, he was a socially conscious folk-punk firebrand, and the Billy Bragg influence was evident. He has retained many of those elements, but “Tape Deck Heart” is a bigger-sounding album that its predecessors, as it mixes bristling punk, intimate acoustic-folk songs, and buoyant pop.

And some of the tracks are more sleek and produced than in the past. He has also talked about having a jones for the music of Weezer, and you can hear that influence on this record as well.

It’s also his “break-up album” - he wrote it in the wake of a painful split with his girlfriend. But he didn’t consciously decide to write songs about the split, he says.

“No, I try not to lead my songwriting but to follow it,” says Turner, who comes to the Blind Pig on Monday with his band, the Sleeping Souls. “It's important to me that it's a relaxed, natural thing, so I like to just let songs arrive in the manner of their choosing. I had a reasonably s----y time in my personal life since the last record, and these are the songs that came out of that, so it's cathartic.

“I just try to let songs be what they're going to be,” says Turner during a late-July e-mail interview from London, on a day off between music-festival gigs. “I guess when choosing the track listing for the album, there's a degree of selection involved in putting together a body of work that hangs as one, but that's about it.”

This disc, given the subject matter, is more personal than his previous albums, but he notes that “all the records I do are personal to some extent. I write autobiographically. But I suppose this one is probably rawer, more exposed, than others I've done.

“There's certainly a willingness to be more open about some of the darker sides of life. But I've never been one for too shady a metaphor, or, indeed, for irony.”

The disc’s more expansive, more layered sound is largely due to the contributions of producer Rich Costey, who has also produced albums by Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Muse, Interpol and My Chemical Romance.

“Working with Rich was a new thing for me, and something I was very keen to do,” says Turner. “He's made some amazing records in his time, and also I was just kind of curious as to how the process would be, working at that level of technicality and skill, it's a new one for me. Rich drove the band and me much harder than we've ever been driven before, which made for a better album I think.

And the bigger sound “just left like the right way to present these songs,” Turner adds. “I do like big sounding records.”

Turner has always appealed to his fans because of the blunt, frank nature of his songs, and those qualities are in abundance on “Tape Deck Heart,” especially given the personal nature of these songs. He can also be self-immolating, like in the song “Plain Sailing Weather,” where he sings, ‘It was a wonderful life when we were together, and now I’ve f----- up every g--- d--- thing.” He drops the F bomb with some frequency on the disc.

He also likes to juxtapose songs that are very different, emotionally and sonically. “Tell Tale Signs” is a languid, intimate song about being used and covering up the emotional wounds. But the next track, “Four Simple Words,” starts out quietly and slowly before exploding into a full-on rocking romp, as he extols his love of punk rock.

Turner is so prolific that a special edition of “Tape Deck Heart” consists of 12 main tracks, plus another half-record’s worth of six “bonus” songs, which include the punchy “We Shall Overcome,” the rousing “Recovery,” the dance-worthy “Time Machine” and the straightforward “Cowboy Chords.”

As for the enigmatic album title, “Tape Deck Heart,” Turner says: “Unlike with previous records, which have usually had a pretty complex intellectual justification for their titles, this one was much more gut instinct. I wrote the line down (he uses the phrase in one of the album’s songs, ‘Tell Tale Signs’), and it just leapt out at me. It feels right, but I also like the way it's open-ended.”

When the album was released in April, one music writer asked him if anyone had asked him yet what a tape deck was. Turner laughed and said no. But, we were curious if anyone has posed that question to him since then. “Ha-ha!,” replies Turner. “No. I think the technological naivete of the younger generation is a little overstated. A lot of cars still have tape decks in them.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.