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To Shane Walker, singing to a crowd is a mythic experience.

"It's like a Herculean shield," he said, referring to the legend of how Perseus (not Hercules) killed Medusa without turning to stone when he looked at her.

"You hold it up and you can see her in the reflection. That's how he chops her head off, and that's how he's able to deal with that beast," Walker said. "Art in general is like that shield, that frame - it puts (a feeling) inside this place where you can deal with it."

As a co-band leader and songwriter for the Austin, Texas-based indie folk and Americana band The Gougers, Walker has experience pouring his thoughts into song. And given the shield of performing on stage, he and co-songwriter/vocalist Jamie Wilson are able to put broad and personal lyrics to country, rock and folk-influenced melodies.

"I think the coolest part of it is to be able to sort of participate in the lives of people who you don't know," Walker said. Solid melodies and stage presence help make that participation possible.

"You can go and listen to a dude with a megaphone talk about love or loss or racism or poverty or whatever, and you can be turned off rather quickly," Walker said, explaining that talking at people is no way to connect with them. The same theory applies to personal problems.

"If you're sitting at a bar next to a drunk guy, and he's crying on your shoulder about his wife and dog leaving him, you're not going to care. But if he puts down his beer and picks up his guitar and walks up on stage in this truthful way, then you can be moved by it, and you can relate to his pain," he said.

On Sunday, The Gougers will relate to Steamboat Springs audiences in one of two publicly ticketed concerts for The MusicFest at Steamboat. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the band plays free aprÃs ski shows at Bear River Bar & Grill as part of Ski Jam. Both concert series are organized by the Austin-based Dickson Productions.

The Gougers formed when Walker heard lead vocalist Wilson sing at a college-town open mic night in 2002. The band - formerly known as The Sidehill Gougers - has put out two full-length albums, including 2007's "A Long Day For the Weathervane." It's taken a while for Walker to get to a point where accessible melodies and harmonies play a true part in his songwriting process, which in its early stages revolved around what he calls "elevated lyrics."

After moving to Austin and getting into pop-oriented bands such as Wilco, Walker has let some of his heady lyrical philosophies go. But the songs are still lyrics-oriented, and Walker tends to start his songs now the way he always did: with an idea. For Walker, songwriting is a reflective process, no matter how he comes at it.

"Putting out these lines and these ideas is a really helpful way to sort of come to terms with the things that you were feeling that you didn't really know that you were feeling. It really helps you understand what's going on in your life," he said.

The goal is to leave space in a song for listeners to bring in their own experiences.

"It causes you to pause and organize your thoughts in a way that inevitably leads to you understanding your situation better," Walker said.

For that realization to happen, a listener needs to take responsibility, and actually listen - something that doesn't necessarily happen with pop music, Walker said, which is why The Gougers are not especially interested in making pop music. It all comes down to the struggle between creation and consumption, he said. The trick is to present a weighty idea in a format that the potentially under-interested listener can understand.

"If you dig your idea, it's sort of like when you see a mother trying to feed her little baby and she does the little choo-choo with the spoon," Walker said.

"I think the melody and the sound would be like the spoon. You know, here comes the train that the nutrition (the lyric) comes in on."