The trouble with touring, and musician David Bazan's solution

David Bazan's last two albums, 2009's Curse Your Branches and 2011's Strange Negotiations, wrestled with the loss of his Christian faith and his troubles with alcohol. His new album, Blanco, is the product of a different kind of struggle: the struggle to keep making music.

As his son was nearing his fifth birthday, Bazan, now 40, realized he'd spent more than half his child's life on the road, much of it playing shows in people's living rooms for devoted but small crowds. He needed to find a way to maintain or even increase his audience while spending more time at home, and do it in an era when the conventional wisdom is that the only way for musicians to earn a living is to constantly tour.

"I've proven that I'm willing to work hard," Bazan said last week, from - where else? - the road, in the middle of a tour that will bring him to Johnny Brenda's on Friday. "So I needed to figure out how to do that hard work, and how to monetize it in a way that was sort of clockwork, like being on tour."

In 2014, that dilemma gave birth to Bazan Monthly, whose subscribers received two new songs on the first of every month for five months. The subscription model guaranteed a steady stream of income, and Volume One was successful enough to beget Volume Two. Instead of spending his time driving from one house show to the next, Bazan could stay home and work on new material while spending time with his family. (He did lay off playing the drums in his home studio, which is why so much of Blanco is driven by drum machines and synthesizer drones.)

It also meant he had to write at a clip he'd never attempted before, with those unforgiving, first-of-the-month deadlines looming. "It forced me to write 20 songs in a pretty short amount of time without the luxury of being precious about any aspect of the process," he says. "That showed me a different side of my creative mind, things I was really happy to know about."

Even for a writer whose work has always cut close to the bone, the songs on Blanco, culled from the subscription series' output, are uncommonly, sometimes uncomfortably, personal. "They're fundamentally charged with something about myself that I was maybe even unaware of," he says.

In "With You," he describes his marriage, or at least a marriage, in terms colored more by resignation than undying passion. "I might have found someone who could love me," he sings, "but I turn around, my life's half over, and I'm with you."

It's not easy, Bazan admits, to balance entrepreneurship and creativity: Spend too much time on the former, and "it stops being fun, and if it's no fun for you, it's no fun for the audience."

But as he sings on Blanco's "Oblivion," "It's no good to complain / of fatigue and existential pain / on a six-week solo drive / while your friends work 9 to 5."

Music has always favored the young and unattached, but there's still a place for veterans with the cunning to leverage their craft in new ways, and who never lose sight of how rare it is to still be living their dream. "You're trying to justify this choice you made when you were nine," Bazan says, "and all your buddies have either gotten rich doing it or given it up."

David Bazan, with Laura Gibson, 9 p.m. Friday, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave. Sold out. 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.