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.

But don’t pigeonhole Strangers as gushy, the singer insists. “It has a few stories on it, like ‘The Trapdoor,’ about a kid who finds a trapdoor in the middle of a field and goes down and meets Death. He looks Death in the eye, and there’s a whole sea of skulls underground—a real catacombs sorta thing—but these angels kinda fly him back up. And the song ‘The Music Box’ is about a war-torn town in Eastern Europe, with an army coming. And ‘Kids (Rise From the Ashes)’ is all about the apathy of our future generation.” The album’s most chiming, optimistic-sounding composition is “a song called ‘Loneliness,’” Harcourt chortles. “And it’s really upbeat.”

Perhaps the most telling number is “Open Book,” an aching, elegiac ballad that multi-tracks the artist’s lissome voice on the chorus. “As children make their way to class I sit and raise another glass / ‘Cause you don’t dwell much on the past when it keeps haunting you,” Harcourt moans, in somnolent tones. And in vino veritas, as the old saying goes. With apologies to Ray Milland, Harcourt cackles, “I had a real lost weekend, but mine lasted six whole months. I partied as hard as possible, having a bottle of wine a day, plus whiskey and vodka. I had a bit of an annus horribilus last year and the year before—my grandmother died; I had to get rid of a few people along the way, like my manager, who betrayed me and was acting in his own interests instead of mine.” He looks both ways to make sure no other rail riders are eavesdropping, then murmurs, “I think I went a bit mad, actually. And also, I was in a relationship that was pretty self-destructive—I needed to get out of it, and it was good that I did.”

That’s when fortune smiled on him and he met Gita, Harcourt purrs affectionately. At this point, perhaps sensing her name being mentioned, Langley awakens, raises her head and rubs her eyes. Had her future beau sunk into clinical depression before they hooked up? “I dunno,” she ponders. “I didn’t see him as being extremely unhappy when we first met. But then again, we met in a relatively professional atmosphere”—i.e. Langley bowing her violin on Harcourt’s sessions. In January ’03 they started dating. “And my lost weekend offfcially ended when I met Gita, really,” Harcourt recalls. “And now I’m a bit more laid back in my songwriting, and I’m not trying to impress as much. I have a bit more confidence about me, so I’m no longer trying to please everyone. And I truly think Strangers is the best thing lyrically that I’ve ever done—I was re-editing and rearranging everything all the time, and just looking at the song and going, ‘No! That’s not good enough!’ and trying to make it better.”

An hour later: Reading. Hand in hand, Harcourt and Langley race off to check into their hotel, then head over in time to catch The Libertines’ rowdy evening appearance. One final word from the singer before he goes, though: “You know, I’ve always acknowledged—and liked—the dark side of me,” he concedes. “But I’d rather write songs that are … well, I’ve said this before, but it’s really hard to write a happy song. Or hard to write a happy song without it being cheesy. But I wrote this new album while living in London, so it’s a completely different feeling; it’s much more upbeat. So this one seems a little more straightforward, really. As opposed to talking about nature and spiders and things like that.”

Before the pair makes it to the festival, Barat will sit in his tour bus, cracking up over his kooky buddy. “Did he show you his Gita tattoo?” he wants to know. “Did you actually see how big that design is? How much trouble do you think he’s gonna be in, once her parents find out?”

Good question. Only time—and Harcourt’s next tell-all sonic confessional—will tell.