To quote the song, Jason Michael Carroll has always been a little bit country and a little bit rock ’n’ roll.

Since his breakthrough single, “Alyssa Lies,” shot to No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in 2006, the North Carolina singer-songwriter has embraced — and been embraced by — the Southern rock and pop stylings of modern Nashville country. Take a listen to his 2015 album, “What Color is Your Sky,” on which ’80s metal guitar pyrotechnics co-exist happily alongside the twangy, down-home ballads (sometimes colliding in the same song, as on “Urgency”).

His first film role, as New Jersey rocker Jimmy Ford in last year’s “Strings,” pushed him further into the rock camp. The film follows Ford’s journey to Nashville to become a star — not so far-fetched considering Carroll’s own journey from conservative Christian upbringing to a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps and finally country music stardom in the late ’90s through today.

Carroll also wrote and recorded seven appropriately rocking songs for the film’s soundtrack (the album release early this year marked his first recording since “What Color is Your Sky”). As he put it during a recent conversation, that’s “kind of very Nashville right now anyway.”

“You’ve seen it happen a hundred times (with) rock stars from the ’90s that are all country artists now,” Carroll said recently from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina. The singer was on a short Thanksgiving break before heading out for a round of duo shows with guitarist Johnny Orr in the Pacific Northwest, including a return visit to Bend to play the Domino Room on Tuesday.

“Not that they weren’t before — there’s a lot of them that really belonged anyway. I think Aaron Lewis was always a country artist; even in Staind he was a redneck. They’ve always seemed to fit. Hootie and the Blowfish always seemed to belong in country music.”

For Carroll, the songwriting is what sets country or country-leaning music apart — and what leads to thriving scenes in some unexpected places such as the Pacific Northwest.

“A lot of today’s country has somewhat of a pop element, but I think that the stories are what really get you,” he said. “For the most part, it’s less repetition; it’s better storytelling (in country music). I like the fact that we get to tell our stories, and they’re so relatable.”

Carroll has always been a songwriter in this storytelling mode, and “Alyssa Lies,” off 2007 debut album “Waitin’ in the Country,” is perhaps the best example. The song, which offers an unflinching look at child abuse through the eyes of a father trying to explain to his daughter why her new friend at school lies about her many bruises and injuries, is still Carroll’s highest charting single, and took him two years to write, as he’s revealed in past interviews.

His recent forays into acting also serve that storytelling streak. In addition to “Strings,” he has a smaller role in the upcoming “Weekend Warriors,” a thriller about a group of friends who head out on a camping trip fraught with “unfortunate events.” He didn’t record any music for the soundtrack this time around, but did get to stretch as a performer in a different way.

“I did do my own stunt, though” Carroll said. “I had to jump off a 25-foot waterfall. Twenty-five-foot doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’m scared of heights so it was pretty intense. … Watching the end process and what we came up with was really fun. I told my family — I told the director that day that I wanted my family there in case I died, so my kids came and watched the shoot.”

Carroll’s lead role in “Strings” came about after the film’s writer, Adam Tarsitano, and directors Patrick Dunnagan and Robert Wagner reached out with a copy of the script.

“I told them, ‘Yeah, I think you’ve got something here’ — it was about a guy trying to make it in the music business,” Carroll said. “And they said, ‘Well, cool; do you want to be in it?’ and I was like, ‘Well, if I’ve got the time, sure.’ They said, ‘Well, would you like to be the lead role?’ It kind of took me back because I didn’t expect that. I wasn’t thinking a lead role kind of thing, especially for my first film. … We shot for an entire month about two years ago, and it was a pretty interesting process: long days because it wasn’t a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) film, so we were on set sometimes 15-hour days. It was crazy.”

Carroll acted in church and school plays as a kid but had not done any professional acting. As the “Strings” role was close to his own story, he didn’t have too much trouble with it, although he wished he had more time to work on his accent (“This Southern country accent is not gonna be ditched very easily,” he said with a laugh).

The songs for the soundtrack came easily too once Carroll stopped worrying about writing specifically to the film.

“If I tried to write to the script, I was running down streets that had no ends,” Carroll said. “… Then when I thought about it, I was like, ‘Well, this guy’s trying to make it in the music business. These songs aren’t gonna be too far off what I would write normally.’”

Fans shouldn’t have to wait nearly as long for new music from Carroll. His next project, an album of gospel songs, has actually been in the works for at least three years now.

“I got started singing at a young age in church, and my mom has been begging me to do a gospel record for her,” he said. “So I was gonna surprise her with it. My dad passed away three years ago, and it was the moment I said, ‘OK, I need to start working on this.’ So I started working on it and then some of my fans found out about it; they really wanted to get it. And then a label in Nashville found out about it, and so now we’re talking at the moment.”

What: Jason Michael Carroll

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Domino Room, 51 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: $17 plus fees in advance

Contact: midtownbend.com or 541-408-4329

GO! listen to Jason Michael Carroll’s latest album, “Strings”