Kian Byrne explores his sound this month at Ça Va

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For the past three years, Kian Byrne has been living what many musicians might call the dream. As drummer, bassist and mandolinist for long-running Irish folk band the Elders, he tours the United States and Europe, playing well-paying gigs that ensure his living as an artist.

It’s a career that, these days, is hard to come by, and Byrne knows it. He sips a drink at the end of the bar at the Rieger, his shoulder pressed against the wall, his hat pulled snugly down on his head. He’s a bit jet-lagged, having just returned the night before from a two-week tour in Ireland. (Over there, he tells me, he was mistaken for Bruno Mars at least twice daily.)

Byrne has learned how to be “the young son” to the elder Elders — including his father, who has been the lead singer for 14 years — and he savors the opportunity to flaunt his Irish heritage. (Byrne, 29, was born in Dublin.) If he had it his way, he tells me with a grin, he’d probably be playing reggae music full time.

“I’ve grown up with Irish heritage and culture,” Byrne says. “That’s been an important part of my life, but a lot of these songs the guys have had for years. When I wake up, I listen to reggae and ska music and old Hank Williams and old country. New bluegrass, Etta James, soul.”

Byrne ticks off a handful of other interests — Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Grammy Award-winning 2007 album, Raising Sand, comes up a few times — and I ask him if he has ever considered taking apart those influences and going solo.

Of course, it has occurred to him. And he does have a solo album pressed and released, though not in any official capacity. It’s a a year old at this point, he tells me with a shrug, but he does sell copies of it when he’s on tour with the Elders. He has no plans to put it online.

But Byrne has a few other irons in the fire. He has been playing in the local ska collective the New Riddim since 2005, and he’s working on an untitled project with guitarist Tim Braun, singer Julia Haile and trumpeter Nick Howell. And there’s the Projectors, the similarly amorphous band (which sometimes includes Braun and Howell) that Byrne uses to air his original material, whenever the opportunity arises.

“It can get frustrating, with newer bands, trying to devote time to them,” Byrne says. “I’m already locked into other things that take time. And when you feel like you’re not making progress with new stuff, that can take a back burner and be pushed to the side.” He pauses. He has a soft voice and a quiet way of talking, as though he’s untrained for the spotlight. “I’m lucky that the people that I’m playing with want to get better and make it sound better.”

Last Friday night, at the soft opening for the new downtown venue Prohibition Hall, a two-man version of the Projectors took the stage. Byrne and Braun remained seated for the entirety of their half-hour set, but the drunk and giddy crowd found plenty of opportunities to dance.

Byrne wears his influences like badges of honor, and he seems like a talented artist trying to find the right fit for his voice. At different moments, his singing recalled that of Arlo Guthrie or Neil Young, his guitar work sliding into twang and blues. One song, the sparse and solemn “I’ve Got to Go,” moved a few members of the audience to contented silence.

Byrne says he finds inspiration for much of his songwriting in his toddler, Olan. He speaks enthusiastically about his son’s proclivity for music — at 2 years old, Olan is already plucking out tunes on his dad’s guitar.

“When I’m out of town and I won’t see him for a while, it’s only better when I see him the next time,” Byrne says. “But when I’m going out of town, I’m doing it to get somewhere, trying to get better and bigger. That’s at least the one positive thing of the times that I don’t get to see Olan, but it is hard. I grew up with my dad being a musician and being gone all the time, and it’s totally different, having the roles reversed.”

Byrne has been smiling as we’ve been talking, but now he takes a pause. I see a hairline crack in the cheerfulness, a glimmer of self-doubt that not even successful musicians living the dream are immune to feeling. I ask him if he anticipates a third-generation Byrne in the Elders. He laughs.

“I hope so,” he says. “I hope whatever I’m doing today, he can look back and see that it’s pretty awesome, and hopefully he can play in a band with me, and I’ll play in a band with him. I would love that. I know he’s got music in him, which blows my mind every single day.”

Thursday, November 5, Byrne begins a monthlong residency at Ça Va in Westport. It’s rare that he has a month in one place, and he promises all new material with a handful of collaborators — Braun, of course, plus New Riddim singer and organist Daniel Loftus. The Elders themselves may make an appearance. But there will be little reggae featured, despite his love for the genre.

“I’m changing the way I write a bit, going back to what I started with,” Byrne says. “I’ve kind of been going back to some stuff that I used to listen to with my dad, and I appreciate it again. It’s way cooler than stuff I was listening to four years ago, what I was writing then, where I thought it had to be clever or something.”

At this point, we relocate to Green Lady Lounge, where Byrne finds a table behind the band — Chris Hazelton’s Boogaloo 7, this night recording a live album — and sits rapt, his whole body moving to the grooves. Fewer than 30 people are in the room, but the turnout isn’t bad for a Monday night. I ask Byrne about his hopes for the reception at Ça Va.

“You know, you love it so much that you just want other people to like it,” he says, leaning over in the candlelight. “You’ve got to be genuine about it.”

I feel another question, but I see, as Byrne leans further into the music — his drink all but forgotten on the table next to him — that now is not the time.