Brooklyn-based musician Kevin Devine released two new albums on Oct. 15, marking his seventh and eighth official studio albums.

Bulldozer, produced by Rob Schnapf, offers a stripped-down Devine solo album, comprising 10 electric folk-rock, acoustic songs. Produced by Jesse Lacey of Brand New, Bubblegum serves as the antithesis to Bulldozer. It shows off Devine’s punk rock side and features members of his touring band.

Devine funded both records with a Kickstarter campaign, which raised $114,000— more than doubling his initial goal of $50,000.

Now on tour (set to make a stop at Local 506 in Chapel Hill on Nov. 15) in support of Bubblegum, Devine spoke with the Technician about his new albums, his tour and his relationship with producers Lacey and Schnapf.

Technician: Why did you choose to release two very different albums at the same time?

Kevin Devine: Well, when we decided to do the Kickstarter thing, something I thought, to me, would be a justification of using that model — ‘cause I wasn’t really sure about using that model for quite a while before I kind of took the leap of faith to do it — something I thought would make it different and stand apart from other crowd-sourced things I’d seen was making two records instead of one.

I see other bands do stuff, or other artists will do something like add a visual component, like, “We’ll make a record and make a movie about the tour or release a series of, you know, handcrafted paintings by the band or whatever. I’m just not talented in that way.

I’m interested in visual art, I’m just not good at it. But I do write songs and do play music, and I do have at least two pretty distinct versions of songwriting stuff in my head. I guess the one that’s more somewhat-folky, Beatles-ish pop kind of thing and then the one that’s more step on a distortion pedal and yell and pretend you’re in the Pixies thing.

I never really seriously considered staggering the releases. It’s probably smarter from a music industry perspective to stagger them, but I really don’t think that stuff. I mean you’re living in a certain system, so it all applies to you, so I’m really trying to ignore all prevailing music industry wisdom at this point ‘cause it’s never really availed me of much.

I thought it would be cool to release them at the same time and give people a full picture of the project they just helped make happen. So far, I think it’s working okay. I guess we’ll find out in a year when I go back around to do the Bulldozer stuff.

Technician: You’ve already got a few, pretty successful albums out, so what led you to set up the Kickstarter project?

KD: Well, yeah, I had made six records prior, and I had put them out on labels ranging from like, you know, two guys in an apartment in Brooklyn up to like a multinational, billion-dollar corporation. There were positive things about all those experiences, and there were negative things about all those experiences.

I guess I just kind of started to feel like, for me — someone who’s not going to be like a “celebritized” musician, ‘cause I’m just trying to have a career in it and a life in it — what a record label needs now is to sort of justify putting out your music and to be a profitable thing for them isn’t really something that I’m necessarily equipped to provide.

I’m not a sort of hipster-blog-saturated artist who’s going to generate a lot of buzz that way, nor am I somebody who’s going to be on Top40 radio and sell millions of singles through iTunes that way. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to crawl out a space in that conventional structure.

Instead of being frustrated or judgmental or angry at the structure for being what it is, which is kind of like being mad at the weather, I decided it was more beneficial for me to kind of do something different.

I had looked at the crowd funding thing and I wasn’t totally sold on it. I was a little concerned there’d be some perceptional backlash.

You used the word successful, and that’s a very subjective word — I mean I do think, you know, I have a career, I play music all over the world and play festivals and have been in the same magazines those “celebritized” musicians have been in, so I am successful to a certain extent.

But I’m also someone who always sells about 10,000 copies of his records and there are definitely different tiers and metrics to that conversation. So I was mindful that there would be some contingency to someone like me using a model like Kickstarter that’d be like, “F— that, that guys been in those magazines and played those festivals, why is he using it?”

So my thought process there was muddled for a while. I didn’t want to abuse the privilege the audience gives you. But the audience had a really clear voice and told me to shut up and it went really beautifully.

 Technician: So what are some of the benefits to releasing music more independently than with a label?

KD: I guess the easiest way to say it is that I already felt like I was doing 90 percent of the work in most cases, but getting far, far, far less than 90 percent of the potential reward. I mean that both financially and more abstractly, emotionally or your mental well-being.

I also feel like, you know, I’d have to sort of debate any marketing idea I had or way I thought they should spend their resources to support our albums. And some labels were better and had better vision and some employees at certain labels had better vision than others and others were not that way.

This way it’s like if it works, we did it, if it doesn’t work, we did it. And I don’t feel like I’m doing that much more work than last time, except this time it’s totally ours and we own all of it.

That’s really gratifying, that’s really different than sort of having these weird debates with these middlemen and convincing people you know your career 15 years into it better than they do five weeks into it — or their involvement with it, rather.

I’m sure no matter how successful a Kickstarter campaign is, that’s for the life of something. At a record label, even an ineffective record label, theoretically they have more resources moving down the line to the life of a project than we will.

Every aspect of making two records and then releasing them and then touring and marketing them and having someone send them to radio and having someone send them to press and dealing with all of those things, $100,000 goes very quickly. It’s not like we’re lying around on stacks of cash or something.

It costs money to do all that yourself. But also, you’re doing it yourself … it’s successful because it’s ours. I think that’s something you don’t see on a label. There are all these projected metrics on what it’s supposed to do, and if it doesn’t do it, you kind of feel like the last girl asked to dance at the ball, like you’ve failed in some way.

Technician: So you’re currently on tour. How’s that going?

KD: Really well.

Actually, then again, there’s so many ways to define all these things. There’s the way it feels, there’s the way you feel — you know, how healthy, how sane you feel — how much you enjoy playing every night, how the crowd seems to be enjoying the performance every night and then there’s the numbers side.

What I can say is: It seems like all of those things taken in concert are the best they’ve been at the same time. And that’s coming from someone on his seventh and eighth records and 10 years out from, you know, like there’s support tours in the U.S.

That’s really good, it doesn’t happen all the time.

Technician: And this is not your first time headlining, right?

KD: No, but it is kind of crazy that it’s my third.

But I think for someone who’s 33 and, like I said, these are my seventh and eighth records. I didn’t do a full U.S. tour until Brother’s Blood, and that wasn’t until 2009. You know, that was my sixth album.

I had done regional headlining stuff … and that was my fourth record. So the first three albums I was working outside of music and making music.

That changed when Capital came into the picture. They enabled me to leave my doubt — you know, my whole life with music had been split with my life as a student and my life as a worker — Capital allowed me to leave or allowed me to not be working another job at the same time, which was a major gift.

When they fell apart and got absorbed by Virgin, the people at Capital we had developed good relationships with gave us our record back for free and allowed us to reissue it and own it, which is something that almost never happens.

And they gave me Rob Schnapf, which opened the door to us having now, like, a seven-year friendship and professional collaboration.

Whatever else happened or didn’t happen during my stay with that label, getting those three things was actually huge.

It might not have been the transformative, upward mobile career experience we’d all hoped it would be, but those three things are nothing to sneeze at.

Technician: You said you’re close with Rob. Are you also close with Jesse Lacey?

KD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I’ve known Jesse since probably 2000. I’ve known him closely since 2004, I guess. Yeah, that’s a deep, long-lasting friendship.

That’s a bit more no-matter-how-successful-his-band-is or whatever, that’s something more of like a tier relationship. Rob I had to get comfortable with that.

I think in the first, probably, year or two, I knew Rob, I was just kind of like psychically digging out in my mind like, “This guy made all the Elliot Smith records, this guy made Beck’s records, this guy made Guided by Voices.”

His résumé, for a guy like me, is so heavy-duty. And his knowledge of music and arrangements and dynamics … is so advanced.

Especially ‘cause I’m this 25-year-old kid meeting him for the first time, it took a while before I felt like I could bring something to that relationship that he might not have had before.

I think for the first while it was my just being like, “I don’t know how to play guitar in front of this guy because he recorded my favorite guitarist for five years,” or “I don’t want to sing harmonies in front of this guy ‘cause he made records with the guy who, I think, wrote the coolest vocal arrangements in any pop music in forever.”

As excited as I was to work for him, I was also a little embarrassed or something. You know, those Elliot records, for me, were like some of the most transformative music I’ve heard in my life.

So I wanted to work with the person who helped actualize those things, but also I was freaked out about my skill level or whatever and that’s totally changed over time. It’s a very two-way relationship now.

And the same is true of Jesse [Lacey], I mean, about the blessing and two-way street. But I always felt like, as a songwriter, I always felt more even. Jesse and I always felt like more of an exchange and less like I was intimidated.

I think part of that’s ‘cause I was oblivious to how big their band was until I went and played some shows with the band. 

I was like, “Oh, you’re like famous to these kids. Like they’re like freaking out when you walk in a room.”

I knew Jesse as this guy whose songs I thought were pretty cool and who’s smarter than the average bear, you know, in that world, and much more interesting.

And then I played with them and was like, “Oh my god, these kids think you’re like Bono or something.” And that was really cool. I just thought he was really good, and it’s nice to see that so do a bunch of other people. 

But I’ve always felt very comfortable, much more like a peer.

I’m very lucky to be close to both of them and thank both of them for their talents — specifically in the making of these two records, and I think you hear it in the finished product, for sure.