Robert Pollard doesn’t talk to journalists any more. Recently, he made a rare exception and granted his first spoken interview in more than a decade to his local paper, the Dayton Daily News. Writer Don Thrasher only got that after years of requests and having the advantage of being a former drummer in Pollard’s long-time band, Guided By Voices.

The 64-year-old prefers to communicate via emailed questions and answers, wryly telling me in a message that his decision to stop speaking was because, “I’ve gotten to the stage where I’d like to maintain a certain mystique, so pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

In truth, he probably doesn’t have time to hit the interview circuit for every Guided By Voices album because he produces so many of them. He recently put out Tremblers And Goggles By Rank, the band’s second record of 2022. It was the 36th Guided By Voices album, but he churns out so many songs that he’s also released more than 20 solo albums and around 50 albums under other band names and with various collaborators. And then there are multiple EPs and singles.

He calls his publishing company Needmore Songs, which is a reference to the street he used to live on in Dayton, Ohio, but could also serve as a motto for his insatiable desire to make music.

He estimates he’s written between three and four thousand songs. How does he do it?

“I don’t write every day,” he says via email. “I write them in bursts three or four times a year. I just brainstorm and record ideas until I exhaust that wellspring of inspiration.”

As for technology – there isn’t any. He sits in his dining room with a guitar, a notebook and a boombox. “Sometimes I just bang away extemporaneously. Sometimes I start with titles or lyrics. When I’m finished, I transfer all the ideas to a CD and from there I start moving things around until things come together in a more interesting way.”

Pollard is also a prolific collage artist. His artworks grace the covers of most of his albums and he sells prints from his website. He starts each day working on his collages, sourcing images from magazines, newspapers and yearbooks from the 1950s to the 1970s. Pollard’s work has been exhibited in places like Michael Imperioli’s Studio Dante in New York, the Irma Freeman Centre For Imagination in Pittsburgh and the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland.

He feels there are strong parallels between the way he makes visual art and the way he writes songs. A good example from the new album is Alex Bell. It has about six distinct sections that lock together, including a late chorus that is such an earworm most bands would have put it upfront, repeated it ad nauseam, and made an entirely new song from it. Pollard buries it towards the end, lets it hang for around 30 seconds and moves on to something else.