Soaked in sweat and spotlight, Wil Wagner looks like he just got off the Roaring Rapids ride at Great America, his bootleg Kendrick Lamar t-shirt so drenched you’d have to wring it out into a kiddie pool. “We have to go now,” he says. “But please stick around. I want to talk to each and every one of you.” Immediately upon leaving the stage, he grabs me and says we should do the interview now, while he’s got a good fifteen minutes of post-show adrenalin.

Nearly twice my size, draped with his stage towel like an albino Bedouin, Wagner leads me through the all-smiles, all-ages crowd, graciously accepting high fives and back pats of adoration. We descend the stairs to the basement mop closet, adjoining the Beat Kitchen’s truly covetable green room area, where he promptly changes into a fresh Hard Girls t-shirt and pops open a beer on a stray strip of metal framing. About half an hour ago, he told the crowd tonight that he was worried that this tour would be “embarrassing.” I ask him how sincere he was.

“Very,” says Wagner. “The last four times we’ve been here we’ve played to big rooms where people just didn’t know who we were, so I tend to keep low expectations. But it’s been better than my wildest expectations so far. That was like the fifth or sixth show that’s sold out.”

On this, their first headlining U.S. tour, the Smith Street Band rolled the dice against unknowable odds. While they’re no strangers to sold-out crowds, their American audiences have all been by proxy, the benefits of covetable supporting slots on the tours of far more popular acts. Until now, Wagner and co. have had no mechanism to gauge an accurate figure of their stateside audience. But the results have proven staggering.

“We’ve been so fucking spoiled. We toured with Frank Turner, the Front Bottoms, AJJ, playing 3,000 capacity theaters with three dressing rooms, a washing machine, a chef cooking for everyone… so with this tour, whatever was happening it was not gonna be playing to thousands and thousands of people every night and getting treated like fuckin’ royalty just because we’re on the bill. I was hoping we’d get like fifty people out in New York and Chicago and LA, and if we get ten, twenty people in the smaller towns that’d be fucking awesome. But the turnouts have been unreal. And talking to the kids after the shows… I feel really inspired and rejuvenated after this tour.”

When he performs, bounding about the stage to his own melodies as if possessed by some demon of empowering catharsis, his incredulous grin routinely returning as a cough to a sick man, Wagner is the living, breathing character of his songs. He is lovesick, insatiable, knowingly imperfect in the way we’d all like to be—a beatified, heroic mess. His songs are little monuments to the depression and anxiety we face so often they become parts of ourselves, little sanctuaries to slip into and worship when the cruel wind of reality gets too dense and prickly. As their narrator, his lyrics thick with that endearing coat of Aussie drawl, Wagner’s role is that of translator, giving voice to those familiar yet shunned feelings.

Here in this mop closet, I get more than a sense—I am told outright—that Wagner is aware of this character. In spite of his post-show adrenalin, as we speak, I can tell that my questions are not just ideas that Wagner has parsed out in previous interviews, but in his own free time. Perhaps all the time, it seems, he remains concerned. He’s a natural onstage but he’s a genius interviewee, the glint in his eye slowed to a steady beam as he breaks down how the Smith Street Band has remained so accessible in the face of rapidly increasing attention.

“Between the first record and the second record, I was very preoccupied with trying to write a song that would be popular. I wrote this whole record that was just shit. We scrapped pretty much all of it, nine or ten songs for what I thought would be the follow-up to our first record that just reeked of ‘I’m trying to write songs that will be on the radio.’ Some people can do that really well but I’m not that kind of songwriter. I can portray emotions that are very personal to me. I guess traditional songwriting, I can’t really do. So that was a big thing from the first record to the second record, freaking out that people were going to hear it.”

When most songwriters blow up, they fall victim to the tendency to read reviews and try to emulate the media’s reductive image of themselves. Disastrous, self-conscious follow-up records are the result, usually snowballing into discographies of self-referential garbage that leave fans sick with nostalgia for the early years, when they still had heart, pain, talent. It’s a common problem, one that’s often simply the result of the newfound, idyllic life of a touring musician, nearly devoid of relatable subject matter for the average listener.

“That’s pretty boring to some people,” he says. “And I feel like the best music you write is always gonna be when you’re working a shitty job and music is a complete escape, so now a bit of that’s taken away.” But Wagner’s trademark neuroticism, a theme of his songwriting and public persona, remains intact in the face of his realized dreams. And it’s his chief asset as a songwriter.

“This is something that I hate about music,” he says. “There are definitely bands where you can tell they’ve changed their sound to be on the radio or something like that and it just reeks. It reeks of shitty desperation and I’m like, ‘I’ve got real desperation!’ (Laughs.) The reason people like our songs is because they are honest and personal. I’m not trying to be aggrandizing or even paint myself in a particularly good light—these are very common, shared experiences with a lot of people and I’m not trying to say that I’m above it. I’m not smarter than everyone. We’re all going through the same shit together. I just happen to have a guitar at the moment, so I can write these songs.

Once I got that into my head, it got rid of the thing of trying to write a popular song. Because since then, there have been songs I’ve written with that in mind that have been played on the radio. We’ve had records that have been in the charts and all that shit. And it’s all completely just a byproduct of me trying to be honest and personal with songs that I’m proud of. I think that’s a really important thing for people trying to write music. If you’re trying to write a big, all-encompassing love song, that’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re trying. And it shouldn’t. It should be like, ‘These are things that I have to fucking say!’ That’s what I really relate to in music.”

He is the counterpoint to Iggy Pop, the self-conscious concern made man, our worries and self-loathings—and, of course, our dreams—manifested into a body of work that is geared toward wasted apartment sing-alongs, windows-down sunset chasing and, perhaps less often than he’d like, the happenstance miracle of new love on the radio dial. But more recently, in the band’s Tony Abbott-skewering 7” Wipe That Shit-Eating Grin Off Your Punchable Face, Wagner’s work has taken on a sense of political urgency.

“I hate it when bands shy away from things,” he says. “‘I don’t want to lose fans so I don’t want to speak on something.’ That happens a lot and it really, really frustrates me. So what, you want to keep the racists on your side? Fuck them, man! A lot of people have asked, “Is there going to be a follow-up to Shit-Eating Grin?” because there’s a lot of things I speak about in interviews, like mental health stuff, gay marriage and things like that. But the last thing I’d ever want to do is force something like that. Shit-Eating Grin was quite perfect in a way because that just kind of fell out of me. All the songs that I really like of mine, and I’m sure those of other people, are almost like a force of nature where you don’t even know what’s happening and then, fuck, you’ve written a song. I think if, now, I was like “Okay, I’m gonna write a big, pro-gay marriage song,” and I sat down and forced myself to write, it just wouldn’t have the same effects because it wouldn’t be a good song.

It doesn’t even have to be a song. You can talk about it in interviews and talk about stuff on stage. If you’ve got that in you, you should one hundred percent fucking say it. You should never shy away from being political or talking about change. It shouldn’t be fucking controversial to be like, ‘I’m pro gay marriage,’ ‘I’m pro refugees.’ And it shouldn’t be something you’re doing to get cred or sell a record. We didn’t get any money from Shit-Eating Grin. We donated all of that. If you’ve got that in your fucking heart, then you should be saying it. But I think, on that same page, you shouldn’t force it because if you’re really passionate about something, it’s going to pop up. I don’t have songs specifically about respecting women at shows and things like that but it just pops up because it’s in my mind and it’s something that I talk about a lot. You shouldn’t shy away from it but you shouldn’t force it. Just be yourself, baby!”

We both laugh at the roundabout route of conversation that arrived at a cheeky cliché, but in an age where being a genuine fake is easier and more encouraged than ever—social media accounts misrepresent our private lives as we clumsily steer our digital avatars in the direction of fake human connection via “likes”—perhaps a longwinded explanation of what it means to be yourself is necessary. For while we’re not hurting for real ideas and opinions from our artists, according to Wagner, the truth is squandered on Facebook and Twitter when it could be brought to life—immortalized, even—in song.

“I reckon a lot of the great writing now is going into arguing with idiots on Facebook,” he says. “But fucking write a song about this, man! What are you doing? I try not to do any of that stuff for that exact reason. It could be a thing where, like, no one sells any records, so you don’t want to lose your fans. Maybe ten, fifteen years ago when anyone could sell 30,000 copies of their record just by releasing it, you could be like, ‘We can make a statement.’ We had a record that charted. I looked at where we were and how many we sold compared to who came 100th and it was like ten records! So it was like, ‘Oh shit, I should have told my friends to buy a copy! We would’ve been number one!’ So maybe that is a thing, where people are too scared to lose any kind of buying audience. But then, what the fuck are you doing in a punk band?”

For every question I ask him, I am hit with another deluge of a thousand words, all cogent and calculated, but occasionally I get the urge to pull Wil back down to earth, away from the flame that magnetizes him so contagiously as to bring me close as well—not because I am afraid for him, but because I know it will burn me. I’m not used to someone taking punk this seriously, and it’s alarming. Our conversation turns to the state of the genre, how in the years since the Bush administration and the surge of political punk music it engendered, politics seem to have left the conversation.

“That is really missing from music,” he says. “And so much music I grew up on, I didn’t know Billy Bragg was writing political songs. I just knew he was writing catchy songs I liked singing along to. But going back now, like, (sings) There is power in the factory… It’s a song about the union! Or the Clash, all these bands where that stuff just comes through in the songs. Maybe we just don’t have that much great punk music right now. I can’t think of a band like Billy Bragg or the Clash at the moment that’s transcending that.”

More and more, I hear my friends and fellow musicians singing the genre’s praises for what it’s done for them in terms of their worldview, their social lives, emotional stability and very sense of identity. For dozens of people I know, it wouldn’t take a second’s reflection for them to declare that punk rock, without exaggeration, saved their lives. It’s a real thing that you either get or you don’t, but it always comes with this limiting caveat, an element of self-deprecation and exclusivity that, if tacitly, recognizes punk as something self-contained with no real sphere of influence or capacity to touch the outside world.

But Wagner is different. He still sees punk the way I did when I was thirteen—as a bastion of idealism that can function as both sanctuary from and servant to an insane world. He’s a singular figure at the moment because of his optimism, so unbridled and animated that it would easily garner ridicule from your average cynic. He’s the fanatical nerd we mocked as a kid, bungling and squawking his way around a cheap guitar and undeveloped vocal chords, now surpassing everyone else because he never took his eye off the ball.

Who else in this scene actually thinks about radio play? About record sales? Is it because he’s from another place in the world, a smaller pond where punk can stand up against other genres and have a fighting chance? Is it the aforementioned, near impossible luck the Smith Street Band has had in their slots as a supporting act? Is Wagner simply delusional, for better or for worse? Or are the rest of us just lollygagging, miles behind him?

“There are no fucking angry punk bands,” he says. “I reckon it’s social media. I reckon today’s Joe Strummer is just sitting on Facebook somewhere in Middle America calling someone a fuckwit right now. That’s my theory, anyway. You’ve got me all fired up now! I’m gonna write a punk song about this. I’m gonna write a punk song about how there are no punk songs.”

We’ll find out soon enough if he was kidding. I doubt it.