At 60, Adrian Legg says: “I’m still wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up.”

It will come as a surprise to those dazzled by the acoustic-guitar virtuosity of British master Adrian Legg, but he doesn’t consider himself “particularly a guitarist as such. …

“I just make up tunes and play them on the guitar,” Legg says from a tour stop in Virginia. … I’m a songwriter who can’t sing.”

There’s a lot of sense in that assessment. Legg, who has put out more than a dozen albums, been a fixture on NPR’s All Things Considered and put out several instructional books and videos, is a rarity — one of those “musician’s musician” types who can write an instrumental tune you have in your head all day. It’s almost always a brilliantly complex musical notion laid in a roots-music tradition and executed with technique that’s dazzling to those who care about such things, and invisibly in service to the song to those who don’t.

It seems a no-brainer that a guitarist (oops; there’s that word) as skilled as Legg, and with such as sense of melody, would be able to hop onto a band, have a hit record, and take things a lot easier from there. But that third step is what hangs Legg up. “It would be nice to have a hit. It would be nice to win [the lottery]. All those things would be nice. And then I’d probably rent a bigger car and do the same thing.”

Working instrumentally has its own advantages, Legg says.

“When you write something that registers with someone else, you get very lucky. Because you’ve communicated. … It’s all the urge to communicate. It’s like you’re a kid standing on the seashore and you find this wonderful sea anemone in a rock pool and you just call everyone over to see it.”

Of course, without words as signposts, people can take from a song whatever they want. And that’s fine with Legg.

“I should never have written sleeve notes, but the record company always wanted them. So I just made stuff up. But they always wanted things explained, and I couldn’t help feeling that was a mistake; that you should give people the freedom to find what they wanted to in the rock pool. They might notice the crab.”

He’s got a few recordings in the can, including a live show, but says “I don’t know what to do with it. There’s no real incentive to go through that hassle and make some repeatable performance which has to be perfect.”

While he’s recorded nine solo albums and more as a sideman, Legg has always had an ambivalent attitude toward recording. Actually, not ambivalent at all.

“I didn’t really like it that much; it was only ever a means of getting gigs. And that’s the worry, post-Napster — how this all works. … With albums not having the same weight anymore, there’s not machinery that works anymore to promote shows with that whole thing.”

The Internet, particularly YouTube, is a partial alternative, he admits, “But everyone I talk to is a bit lost about what to do. We’ve had the tail of recording wagging the dog of music for so long, we don’t know what to do when the tail’s fallen off.”

But for Legg, the live show is the essence of music. He’s got “an iPod full of things I could never go and hear,” and is digging into the Schubert he listened to in his youth at the moment, but the finality of recording gives him pause.

“When you recorded it, for lots of people, that defined the piece, even if it changed afterward. So it had a degree of importance it didn’t really deserve. It was a souvenir rather than a laying down of the right way.”

When recording was invented, he says, “People were of the opinion that ‘this will kill music.’ Well, it didn’t, but it certainly had an effect.” On the early recordings, “people weren’t playing for recording; they were playing. …

“I think recording’s quite destructive, because what’s valuable about music, and the way it’s been over the centuries, was that you went to do something, went to hear something, with people, and what was left in your mind was something that changed. And that change was a kind of growth. I think it’s those bits and pieces that have been left in my mind that have changed into the music I make now.”

While recordings can provoke a similar experience, in Legg’s case those experiences come from records he’s only ever heard once, such as “Wham” by Lonnie Mack. “I never had a record player when I got started, so I learned everything second-hand, from people who’d heard it. That was actually quite nice and organic.”

Sounds like an old-fashioned way to work. “I suppose it is. I always thought it was the natural way.”

But without recordings, how does, say, a kid from the north of England learn about Muddy Waters?

“I suppose the way I learned about country music as a kid in Liverpool: From other people doing it. And it was corrupted in the process, but that corruption is a process of growth, isn’t it? Decay and growth are the same thing, aren’t they?

Legg is on his second trip to the States this year, and says that he’s usually better received here than at home in England, being that “the guitar is the American instrument. … I wanted to do more at home in England, but that was a bit stupid.”

And at 60, he’s still carrying on one show and one tour at a time.

“I’m still wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up. But I do get aches and pains.”

Adrian Legg is at the Common Fence Point Community Hall, 933 Anthony Rd., Portsmouth, Saturday night at 8. Tickets are $20; call (401) 683-5085.

THE IMMORTAL Dave Brubeck plays at Showcase Live! at Patriot Place, on the grounds of Gillette Stadium, in Foxboro, Saturday night at 8. Tickets are $57.50 and $89; call (866) 448-7849 or go to www.showcaselive.com.

THE BLACK KIDS take a new-wave approach to old-fashioned lyric-laden songwriting on their debut album Partie Traumatic, with their triumph so far being the rousing single “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You.” They’re at Club Hell, 73 Richmond St., Providence, Saturday night at 9. Call (401) 351-1977.

AN INTERVIEW that I swear really happened:

Hey, wasn’t “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You” a former Song of the Day at the ProJo Music Blog?

Sure was.

Is that still at http://musicblog.projo.com?

You know it.

You do that every day?

That and more. Music, news, music-related stuff I find dumb yet interesting. Why are you asking?

No reason at all.

rmassimo@projo.com