Art Garfunkel performs a pops concert with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Saturday night at PPAC.

Lynn Goldsmith

Art Garfunkel may be 67 years old and more than 30 years into his solo career, but he says he just came home from a European concert jaunt “more thrilled with my job than ever in my life.”

The singer, who’ll be performing in Providence Saturday, says he started putting together a permanent backing band about 20 years ago and has been adjusting the personnel and the set list for almost that long. Now he says he’s found the right combinations of people and songs.

Garfunkel says that his set list these days has about half Simon & Garfunkel material and half solo songs, with a new emphasis on his early solo records.

“More and more,” he says, “I see myself as a singer who can do many different writers credit. I have doo-wop within me, and I’m a crooner, and I’m an Everly Brother, I’m a Josh Groban.… My favorite form is ease. I love to be super-pretty and put the capital ‘P’ on that kind of rock ’n’ roll.”

On his European tour, he says, “This set list … had me feeling with every next song, ‘This one I really feel like singing.’ … When it really moves beautifully, it’s an ageless thing. And I’m like a 26-year-old when it comes to my show.”

Picking songs for set lists and records, Garfunkel says, is a matter of tracing “a life history of fondnesses.… The heart’s delights, musically, are a life’s expression of favorite things.”

And there’s always another fondness to get to, says Garfunkel, who hasn’t yet gotten the hit “What a Wonderful World,” which he sang with Paul Simon and James Taylor, into his show.

“All my life I’ve wanted to do Nat King Cole’s ‘Nature Boy.’… I have yet to get to it. There are always others in the way I’ve got to do first.”

Garfunkel also enthused about the addition of “this brilliant rock ’n’ roller” Cliff Carter on piano and Larry Saltzman on guitar, who he says swings hard on the Simon and Garfunkel material.

“It’s not a breakthrough,” he says; “it’s not what journalists see as a story. It’s the constant relaxing that allows your inner stuff to express itself.… It is as if at this old age of mine, I finally got out of my own way.…

“I’ve finally come someplace,” Garfunkel says. “I’ve cultivated my naïvete, so I stay scared through the years, almost on purpose, so it’ll be a real growing and living experience for me. I purposely play insecure. But here I am, at this age in spite of myself, feeling a great can-do feeling with every one of the songs I do.”

A listen to his latest record, 2007’s Some Enchanted Evening, reveals that Garfunkel’s luminous voice is in as good a shape as ever, a feat he describes as harder than it used to be. “I go to work and shape up and warm up and sing. I walk; I’m a big walker.”

In preparation for a specific show, “I like to sing along with certain people. If I’m singing a unison with Michael McDonald, I’m going to get a frenzied upper register going for myself. And the more accurate and more unison I can be with these master singers, the more those training wheels sketch what a well-sung bunch of lines should be.”

For all Garfunkel’s work as an interpreter, as well as a writer of prose poems, it wasn’t until 2002’s Everything Waits to Be Noticed that he made his songwriting debut. He says that songwriter-producer Billy Mann encouraged him and brought him down to Nashville to write and record the album with the help of singer-songwriters Buddy Mondlock and Maia Sharp.

“Melodies — that’s a real easy thing to me,” says Garfunkel, who adds that his prose poems in books such as Still Water provided a template for a lot of the songs. “But to dovetail and marry words to melody, that’s it’s own art. And it takes perspiration, and you hang in tenaciously while you hunt and peck.”

He’s at ease saying he’s not a songwriter at heart, though. “I’ve moved on. It hasn’t left me going to the piano on my own for the next songs.”

That willingness to try things and move on is what keeps Garfunkel, who has acted in several venues over the years (including an episode of The Flight of the Conchords and the movie The Rebound later this month) and continues to write on the page. “I just do what the next project is. You stay interesting to yourself through life. That’s the key.”

Garfunkel says that he does roughly a third of his 50 or so shows a year with symphony orchestras, as he’ll do in Providence on Saturday. “They’re thinning out across America with budget cuts, but I like that work.”

He says that he likes the orchestral charts he works from, but that even though the musicians are always skilled, he’s always “kind of fearful” to meet and work with the orchestra for only an hour and a half the afternoon before the show “so that they know what I call medium-loud. And each hall has different acoustics. [It] leaves you crossing your fingers in a nervous state for the evening.

“And then comes the show, and people do what they must do.… The stereo wrapping around of the sound is tremendous.”

On his Some Enchanted Evening, a collection of standards, Garfunkel re-teamed with producer Richard Perry, who was behind the board for the singer’s 1975 Breakaway album, which gave him his first solo hit, “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

“I love that stuff,” Garfunkel says of songs such as “I Remember You,” “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” and “It Could Happen to You” from the album; “it comes so easily.…

“The first time I thought singing was cool, it was those crooners. (He sings a bit from “Vagabond Shoes.”) I thought that was a great attitude, that swing, Sinatra-esque thing.”

He says he didn’t realize that immediately. “I thought I began to connect with music in the Martin Block Make Believe Ballroom, early ’50s, which is the beginning of doo-wop. But before there was doo-wop rock ’n’ roll, there was Johnny Ray, those early ballads of the late ’40s, and that’s what got to me first.… Those early songs, that’s where the elegance is.”

Garfunkel says he plans to record more standards, but he’s not on a strict schedule.

“Record-making has gone discouraging. The whole downloading thing means that every offering no longer is an offering; it’s part of the stream of water. It’s become tap water. It’s caused me to turn elsewhere, and fortunately a singer has the studio and the stage.”

As for his old partner Paul Simon, Garfunkel says they get together for dinner occasionally and talk about working together. “We’re cooking up a little something — I don’t want to talk about it specifically, but we are. But, as we have been for years, we’re papas. We have families that we raise; we have grief with our kids.”

Art Garfunkel and the Rhode Island Philharmonic Pops perform at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 220 Weybosset St., Providence, Saturday night at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $75 to $40; call (401) 421-2787.

rmassimo@projo.com