Onelinedrawing's Jonah Matranga
Photo: Old Records

He records his albums at home on a Macintosh computer and has a penchant for spilling his guts on his Web site. He wears his heart on his sleeve and is a little disgusted by people who treat music as a commodity.

Moby, right?

No, actually, Jonah Matranga. Maybe you know him as Onelinedrawing. Maybe not.

He's a one-man emo band — and former lead singer of Far — who is, literally, crisscrossing the country and winning over fans one at a time with his intimate, home-recorded songs about heartbreak and sweaty sex. Unlike the arena-rocking Moby, though, Matranga is meeting those fans in clubs, living rooms, on boats, in basements and under piers.

"The whole community aspect is slowly becoming the thing," said Matranga, 32, about the intimate vibe he's established with his fans during his "any-venue-any time" shows. After a series of split singles and EPs, his first full-length recording as Onelinedrawing, Visitor, was released last month. For Matranga, the highly personal music is not only his catharsis, but, more importantly, a way to start conversations with his fans.

"The music helps me through stuff, but it's really about finding people who have similar values and want to talk about them," he said. To that end, former major-label artist Matranga has crafted a Fugazi-like low-key indie aesthetic that encompasses everything from playing the odd living-room gig between club shows to offering a sliding-scale payment system for the merchandise on his Web site. And, instead of trying to find a big-name director to shoot a glossy video, Matranga persuaded his label to get him a video camera and some editing software so he could shoot a clip himself for the album's first single, "Smile."

"I had that weird moment in high school where I was sitting in my room alone listening to Pink Floyd while it was raining outside and I got that sense that I liked music more than people," said Matranga, who grew up in Boston and moved to Northern California following Far's demise. "I felt weird for a moment, but then I realized I really enjoy what happens when people let go of their junk for a second and make something that really connects. That's what good art is for me. That's what I hope my music does for people."

Visitor is a mix of 11 songs Matranga wrote over the past dozen years, making it something of a closet-cleaning project for the singer. The tracks range from the Nick Drake-like opening weeper, "Um ... ," which glumly chronicles his divorce, to the emo-by-numbers, heart-on-sleeve diary entry "Candle Song." Ironically, the "almost stereotypically emo" ballad, written 12 years ago, is the oldest song on the collection, from a time well before the genre was fodder for Time magazine profiles.

"I like songs that make people a little uncomfortable because the subject matter is maybe too personal," Matranga said, admitting to being a bit of a drama king. "I am dramatic and very serious. One of my favorite phrases is, 'Be serious enough to have fun.' But fun is not forgetting about stuff, but digging in and figuring it out without it being tortuous. 'Um ...' is about me being a mess. It's not about trying to make you sad, but me trying to figure out the truth."

Matranga's friend, Dashboard Confessional singer Chris Carrabba, said that honesty is why the songs on Visitor blew him away the first time he heard them. "He's one of the most amazing songwriters I've ever heard," Carrabba said.

That uncomfortable digging Matranga likes mostly takes the form of confessional acoustic ballads, but he said he wasn't afraid of rocking out from time to time, either. The swinging, new wave "Bitte Ein Kuss" (pidgin German for "Please a Kiss") is a fluffy slice of pop about "in-the-bed disco" that lasts a bit longer than the relationship that inspired it. Matranga briefly considered dropping the song — which wasn't even completed before the relationship ended — because he was afraid it broke up the album's otherwise perfectly melancholy mood.

And, if that song doesn't give you time to dry your eyes, surely "Smile" will. The Smithereens-meets-Replacements rocker features a solo from one of the summer's biggest movie stars, R2D2. Like the living-room shows and sliding-scale merch, incorporating the computerized squeals of an $8 R2 toy into his recordings and live shows was another example of Matranga's musical serendipity.

"It's just a silly idea that took off," Matranga said. "If I wanted to make a master plan to sell millions of records I could do a lot better than using a toy. It's another way to give people that moment where they go, 'Huh? What's that?' and they have to listen closer." Matranga sampled the toy's noises and, although he's afraid it's already jumped the shark, he still enjoys performing with his childhood buddy as a type of interspecies ventriloquist act.

"In a way I can't explain, he's been a great companion," Matranga said bittersweetly. "But I think he's probably reached the apex of his career and will probably start a solo project soon."

• Onelinedrawing

Dashboard Confessional, a.k.a. Chris Carrabba
Photo: Vagrant

"One-man band": when you hear that phrase you probably picture a dude on a street corner with a pair of cymbals between his knees, a drum on his back, some kazoos in his mouth and a guitar case full of quarters. Think again.

While naming a band after yourself is fine and good for guys like Dave Matthews and Jon Spencer, some band names are actually just cryptic pseudonyms for a single, mad studio genius.

The past year has seen an explosion of do-it-yourself-ers, including ex-Eels bassist Tommy Walter with his band Abandoned Pools, stone alone emo-ter Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional (see "Dashboard Confessional Concert Checklist: Tickets, Earplugs, Kleenex"), Citizen Cope mastermind Clarence Greenwood and Custom, a.k.a. Duane Lavold. Others who've recently gotten some one love include ex-Nine Inch Nails programmer Chris Vrenna (Tweaker), Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy) and solo "Superman" John Ondrasik (Five for Fighting).

These artists typically work and write alone, performing nearly every note on their records, sometimes even drawing their own album covers and directing the video. So, assuming they're proud of their accomplishments, what gives with the isolation and the fake ID?

"Not to sound cheesy, but it's just a different way of marketing yourself," Walter said of the choice to go by the handle Abandoned Pools for his pop/electronic solo debut, Humanistic. "I wanted to leave it open to putting a band together, but, also, if you go out as 'Tommy Walter,' there's no man behind the curtain. You're really putting yourself out there, and I'm not some folk singer with a guitar. This creates more of a mystery and an aura."

Recent rock history is littered with "bands" that were mostly clever names for the music of a charismatic frontperson. From Prince and the Revolution to Days of the New (Travis Meeks), Smashing Pumpkins (Billy Corgan) and the Magnetic Fields (Stephin Merritt), sometimes one (with some help) is enough.

Electronica acts such as Stardust (Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter) and Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) have been doing it for years: mixing up alluring stage names to mask the fact that all that music is being made by one person, a computer and a host of sampled voices.

But lately, the world of emo rock has blossomed into a haven for artists licking their wounds behind dramatic band names, such as the fragile Bright Eyes (Connor Oberst), Pedro the Lion (David Bazan) and Onelinedrawing (Jonah Sonz Matranga).

For Dashboard's Carrabba, former lead singer of the emo band Further Seems Forever, the choice was clear — and logical. "I definitely didn't want it to be 'The Chris Carrabba Experience,' " he said. Although Carrabba had musical assistance from members of his touring band on his album, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, much of his live show is geared around his solo performances.

"I wanted [the music] to be a group experience, something I shared with the audience," he said, noting that most fans shout along to every word at his shows. "I wanted it to be something that made the crowd feel like they were part of it, something communal. Naming it after myself would have diminished their experience and wouldn't have fostered that same vibe."

Like Walter, Custom's Lavold chose a collective-sounding name to leave open the possibility of working with his touring band in the future, but also because it's been his nickname forever. "I work alone, not because I want to do everything, but because I can," said Lavold, who not only performs almost every note on his album, but also produced it and directed the controversial video for the single "Hey Mister."

"If you have an imagination that hears and sees things, it used to be that you were reliant on 'x' amount of humans to manifest what you're imagining," he explained about the other side of the one-man band coin: preferring to work in solitude. "Now with [recording software] Pro Tools and a Macintosh, you can bungle your way through creating things in your head without hiring 50 players and spending $2,000 a day for a 'real' studio."

Custom said the home studio revolution has not only made it easier for musicians to be jacks-of-all-trades, it has allowed them to record lush albums like his with just a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment. He predicted that the floodgates opened up by such relatively cheap software as Pro Tools and the like could inspire a new generation of recording artists who go it alone.

"I want people to know that we are making records that are in stores on $4,000 worth of equipment," he said. "The intimidation factor of seeing bands in studios with gigantic mixing boards is gone. You don't need that."

Walter works better when he can be alone with his thoughts, and Carrabba just wants everyone to join the band. But you have to hand it to lo-fi rocker John Darnielle, a.k.a. Mountain Goats. In the past, he's sometimes taken the one-man band concept to its logical conclusion by beginning some solo gigs with the announcement, "We are the Mountain Goats."

Okay, maybe one isn't the loneliest number.

• Dashboard Confessional
• Custom
• Abandoned Pools
• Bright Eyes
• Pedro the Lion