Shervin Lainez / submitted photoDavid Ryan Harris, above, performs with Gabe Dixon at 5:30 p.m. Monday at The Astro Lounge as their Twobadours on the Run Tour hits Bend.

After years of sideman work, David Ryan Harris wants the spotlight again.

While the singer-songwriter/guitar player’s name may not immediately ring a bell, his playing and production work should. Harris’ list of recent collaborators includes Tedeschi Trucks Band (he co-wrote a song, “Shelter,” on the band’s 2011 album “Revelator”); India Arie (he produced and helped co-write songs on the soul singer’s 2013 album “SongVersation”); and Nick Jonas and the Administration (he played guitar on the band’s 2010 debut album). From 2004 to 2012, Harris served as a guitarist in John Mayer’s touring band, and has played alongside Santana, Australian singer-songwriter Guy Sebastian and Dave Matthews Band.

All this work has left little time for Harris’ long-running solo career, which kicked off in 1997 with his self-titled debut album. While his third album, 2007’s “The Bittersweet,” was considered something of a breakthrough, he’s only just followed it up with last month’s 11-track “Lightyears,” originally planned as a series of EP releases for last year.

“(It was) a little bit of just wanting to control my own destiny, so to speak,” Harris said recently from Chicago while in between legs of his solo tour, which heads to the Astro Lounge on Thursday. “You know, if you play for another artist, you’re sort of beholden to their sort of musical trip, or to the places they play, whatever. And that’s not to disparage (these artists) in any way. You’re just subject to someone else’s schedule, and I wanted to do something or just sort of begin to forge the part of my career path where I have a little more control.”

Harris has ramped up his solo performing to celebrate the release. His current tour, which kicked off with singer-songwriter Melissa Polinar in early October, will keep him on the road through mid-November playing old haunts and new cities. Leg two of the tour features opener Tyler Lyle, who co-wrote a song on “Lightyears,” “The One You Love.”

“I’ve sort of toured at this level with sort of these size venues really since I started; I just didn’t do it with any real regularity,” Harris said. “I have to book these types of tours between John’s (Mayer) tours or whoever it was that I was playing with. … I still — Chicago I get to at least once a year, Atlanta once a year, and Nashville. A lot of these places I’ve been before, just stringing so many of them together, that’s new.”

Bend is also new to Harris.

“It’s one of those cities where I’m equally anxious and excited to go there and start something,” Harris said. “Anxious, like, ‘Oh no, is anybody gonna show up?’”

In press materials, Harris described “Lightyears” as “me sending up a flare into the darkness from where I live.” While the album does touch on the personal — “Still Be Loving You” was written for Harris’ mother, while “I Can’t Wait to Meet You” is about Harris’ son — the darkness Harris refers to is more external in nature.

“I felt like, even sort of culturally and societally, we’re in kind of a dark — kind of a gray place,” he said. “And I wanted to do something that was hopeful, but not hokey, and still acknowledged the dark, so that you look at the overall picture and it’s 60 percent in the light, 40 percent in the dark, moving toward the light.”

The shows behind the album have been stripped-down affairs, but far from gentle. Harris has been accompanying himself on electric guitar for these shows, allowing him to get some of the snarling grit found in his old bands Follow For Now and especially Brand New Immortals, the project he started with former Arrested Development and Black Crowes members in the early 2000s. In fact, some Brand New Immortals songs may make it into the set, Harris said.

After years of playing solo acoustic shows, Harris wanted to ramp up the sound.

“When I do the solo acoustic thing, it’s like having a Crayola box of eight crayons,” he said. “This is probably 64 colors with the solo electric show.”

He’s also integrated looping equipment into his shows again after a long absence.

“When that stuff first started happening back in 2000, I was really, really into it, but at some point I started to feel like it was a circus sideshow,” Harris said. “I wanted to be sure everyone knew what they were seeing was no tricks, so then I got super, super stripped back. Then I went to see Ed Sheeran a while, a couple months ago, (and thought), you know, I used to really love doing that; maybe I’ll use it on one or two songs.”

It makes sense, given the intricate arrangements and diverse styles found on “Lightyears.”

The album tackles nearly every style Harris has attempted since his early days — from the sunny soul of opening track “One Day” (which features Mayer and Arie) to the snarling blues riffs and steady pulsing backbeat of “The One You Love.”

Harris just as readily cites Bad Brains as an influence alongside traditional bluesmen such as Son House and Robert Johnson. His early music with Follow For Now earned comparisons to Living Colour, while the single album by Brand New Immortals, 2001’s “Tragic Show,” mixed raucous riffs with the more soulful singing Harris has become known for in his solo work.

Harris’ punk past taught him that while musical genres may differ, the power and message in the music can still come across.

“The anger in a Bad Brains song is the anger in a protest song from the ’60s; a love song in one genre is a love song in another,” Harris said. “It was great to be able to draw a line between all those things.

“At the same time, I just didn’t know any better,” he continued. “I had a record store that I loved to go to, and I’d go in there sometimes and buy a record just because I liked how the cover looked. I was in there often enough that the owners, or the guys behind the counter at the store, would give me stuff — ‘Oh, you’ll like this.’ Everything from Nick Lowe to Loretta Lynn to Japan and other bands from the UK. It was always just jumbled all up; I never thought twice about doing it.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com