Ed Harcourt

London's Waterloo station is where the Tube intersects with country-crossing British rail. Today’s a bank holiday, but the place is crawling with skinny Adidas-shod boys and girls forming restless queues at nearly a dozen ticket windows. Most of them carry backpacks and camping equipment; en masse, they’re headed up to Reading for its annual outdoor concert with featured U.K. superstars like Razorlight, The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand. But gradually the swarm of rockers notice someone unusual—one who walks among them doesn’t fit the fey Britpop profile

The odd man out is oblivious to the growing number of stares. Shag-haired and comparatively stocky, he sports wraparound shades, a beat-up black leather jacket, muttonchop whiskers, ragged black jeans and lizard-skin cowboy boots so weathered they’re barely held together by duct tape. His girlfriend is decked out in a hippie-flowing floral-print dress, her own wraparounds and vintage clunk-heeled Frye boots. Lost in giggle-punctuated conversation, they inch forward toward the station agent in three-minute intervals. Stares are soon replaced by whispers: Their fellow Reading-bound passengers just know these Stones/Faces fashion throwbacks are famous. But who?

Boarding passes finally purchased, folk-rock raconteur Ed Harcourt and his new girlfriend, violinist Gita Langley, scan the schedule postings and realize—to their horror—that a train north is leaving now. As in right now. Off they clomp in their funky boots, squeezing past an irritated conductor.

Folks on the train eye Harcourt, too, though not for long. Sure, he might be famous, but soon the lager will be flowing and they’ll be seeing set after set from equally renowned artists at Reading. What does one soft-spoken singer matter today? And Harcourt, for his part, is relishing the anonymity. He’s eager to hit the rain-soaked grounds, too, looking forward to hanging out backstage with his longtime chum, The Libertines’ Carl Barat. In preparation, he even changes shirts on the train, donning a hot-pink one that boldly proclaims “F--- rock stars!”—a perfect complement to his jacket badge, which reads “Boy bands suck.” In the process, he pauses to show off a new bicep tattoo, huge ink-black letters commemorating his love for “Gita.” Seeing the design, Gita smiles, then promptly slumps over her armrest and falls asleep. Harcourt adoringly strokes her hair, and—in a whisper other riders can’t overhear—begins discussing why Strangers, his new fourth outing on Astralwerks, is such a drastic departure from his misanthropic Mercury-Prize-nominated 2001 debut, Here Be Monsters, and its spooky ’03 follow-up, From Every Sphere.

As the carriage rattles through the rustic British countryside, the often-grim Harcourt grows unusually upbeat. The well-traveled son of a diplomat, he grew up completely “obsessed with dreams, fairy tales and ghost stories,” and long ago reconciled his own future death as “quite a positive thing, even though I used to have a real fear of it and always had images of myself dying, going out of my body and seeing myself.” He wound up residing at his grandmother’s rambling rural estate, where he set up home-studio shop and taught himself to play almost every instrument imaginable, even Theremin. While she remained upstairs, Harcourt—after punching the daytime clock as a chef—holed up four stories down with a Tascam Portastudio, where he’s composed an estimated 400 songs. Some were throwaways, like “Henry Rollins’ Neck Is Bigger Than His Head.” Other, deeper works, considered the wonder of his natural surroundings—trees, rivers, spiderwebs—and ended up on his Wurlitzer-piano-based Here Be Monsters, out on chic U.K. indie Heavenly.

If Harcourt’s music felt a tad intellectual and reclusive, well, what else could be expected from a brainy, tome-poring hermit? But now, he sighs, things have changed dramatically. At 27, he’s swanning giddily over Gita, hopelessly in love. And Strangers—produced by Jari Haapalainen of Swedish band The Concretes—dotes on the relationship, in plush, gorgeous ballads like “Black Dress,” “Something to Live For,” “This One’s for You” and “Let Love Not Weigh Me Down” (a ponderous Floydian anthem featuring Langley on fiddle). The couple is currently in the process of buying its first apartment together, and Harcourt is genuinely concerned about what his—and her—parents will make of his new Gita tattoo.