Then again, it's not every day you get the opportunity to speak with Marty Anderson.

A bedroom troubadour with a reputation for being a bit of an eccentric, the 26-year-old is so staunchly reluctant to discuss Low Road and High Road (both on Absolutely Kosher) – his masterpieces of minimalist pop due for release March 15 under the name Okay – that it'd be easy to suspect his resistance is a disingenuous, Cat Power-esque ploy. Except when I'm speaking to Anderson for his first-ever interview, his excruciatingly awkward pauses and initial refusals to answer my questions aren't the antics of someone with any sort of media savvy. On the contrary, the painfully shy Anderson is tight-lipped for a far more genuine reason.

"I don't know how comfortable I am explaining what I made, because it's not really about that," he says hesitantly over the phone from Fremont, where he remains mostly housebound due to a rare form of Crohn's disease that keeps him hooked up to an I.V. 16 hours a day. "I mean, I feel like every syllable I'd say would take the person further away from their own experience with the music – and that's all that matters."

But when people finally hear his albums – which, at least to these ears, are so unnervingly intimate that they practically demand an intense emotional investment from each listener – won't they inevitably wonder about the songs' surrounding circumstances?

"In my mind," he insists, "explaining what the songs are really about just changes the person's natural process of making her own choice, of having the chance to make her own judgment about the music's meaning."

Listeners will finally get that opportunity at Noise Pop, which features the live debut of Okay, but don't be surprised if Anderson seems familiar when he takes the stage. Over the past several years he's collaborated with Pinback's Kenseth Thibideau in Howard Hello, released a solo album under the pseudonym Jacques Kopstein, and fronted the noisier rock act Dilute. After that band went on hiatus in 2002, however, Anderson's worsening illness – which has ebbed and flowed in intensity since its diagnosis in 1996 – made him a virtual shut-in at the Oakland apartment he shared with his girlfriend; his seclusion ultimately led to the inception of Okay.

"What I did was stay in my small square room most of the time – eat, read, sleep, shit, pray, write, do the opposite-sex thing, and record," he explains. "I just kept documenting what I was going through naturally, and I really had no idea what all the recording would yield in the end. I just kept following my process as honestly as I could – my understanding of which was far from perfect at the time."

In February 2004, one year after he began recording, Anderson emerged from that small square room with Low Road and High Road. Completed shortly before health concerns and his relationship's dissolution prompted him to relocate to his parents' Fremont home, the albums are full of expansive, painstakingly layered pop gems primarily constructed of guitars, keyboards, and drums. Throughout, however, the focus remains on Anderson's warm, inviting warble and the way he repeats deceptively simple phrases until they assume an unexpected gravitas. Indeed, the more he obsessively recites lyrics like "You can save yourself" and "There's a devil around you all of the time," the more heartbreaking and desperate they become.

Taken together, the albums offer a fragile, unflinching, and often-painful look through one man's window on the world.

"The majority of where the songs start, for me personally, is from energy manifested by being surrounded by this perpetual sickness – within my body and within this country," Anderson eventually reveals, after much cajoling to divulge the albums' themes. "As the recording progressed, it became apparent that each song was coming from [one of] two very specific places. Low Road is about what many have been made to believe and how they have been worn raw, down to a nub spiritually, by capitalism and the American dream. High Road is focused on coming out of Low Road's hopelessness, recognizing those obstacles and finding ways around them, seeing the positive with a fresh self-optimism."

If that sounds like emotionally taxing stuff, well, it's also some of the most poignant and rewarding music you'll hear this year. And while knowing the troubled conditions under which they were recorded makes it easier to understand why Anderson might've been reluctant to initially detail his albums' themes, it also becomes clear that he wrote and recorded Low Road and High Road as both a way to make sense of a chaotic life and as a means of survival.

"What now looks like the release of two 'indie' CDs was really just a documentation of my process," Anderson says. "Now that they are finally being released, I'm done with them. They've already served their purpose for me a thousand times over. They've sustained me as much as water or air. At the very least, perhaps somebody will stumble upon these records, now or later, and somehow end up listening to them on headphones, uninterrupted, while they are alone. And if that person thinks about their own destiny just a little slower, even for a moment, I think that's good."

Okay performs with Joanna Newsom, Nicolai Dunger, and Nedelle Feb. 26, 4 p.m., Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market, S.F. Advance tickets are sold out. (415) 861-5016.