It's a few hours before Matt Mays hits the stage at Toronto's venerable Horseshoe, and you're sitting at a neighbouring bar having a beer with him.

You're taken in by his easy demeanour and his utter lack of pretentiousness. You're touched by his disinterest in abandoning Halifax, where "all the bands get along so well and support each other," in search of fame and fortune in Hogtown. And you can't help but appreciate the way the good Canadian boy pauses, when he realizes he's behind schedule for a local radio interview, to chug his remaining brew before bolting out the door.

And then he's gone. And after a few moments, when you start replaying the conversation in your head, you realize just how ambitious the East Coast's Next Big Thing really is.

It's not so much his calm suggestion that breaking into the U.S. and European markets, a daunting task for a quintessentially Canadian, shaggy-topped roots rocker (a recent set at Austin's South by Southwest festival notwithstanding), is "high on the priority list." Nor that on the same day his heavily buzzed-about sophomore CD is being released, he's already talking about the next one.

Ambitious, to be sure. But where Mays really aims high is in effectively trying to kick-start two different music careers at once.

In 2003, he released a self-titled debut album. Folksy, catchy and intermittently acoustic, it produced a quasi-hit single in City of Lakes and delayed-reaction nominations at this weekend's Juno Awards in the new artist and adult alternative categories.

This week, he released what is more or less another self-titled debut - only this time, that title isn't just Matt Mays, but Matt Mays and El Torpedo, in honour of his new backing band. It's a flat-out rock album that rarely pauses for breath over its 14 tracks, and sounds much like a recorded jam session - which is exactly what Mays, who goes to great pains to present the band as a separate entity from his solo efforts, was aiming for.

The band treated the recording sessions like a live performance, with all five members in the room at once on virtually every track, songs played straight through and Mays rejecting any overdubbing to gloss over imperfections. "I'm really happy with the fact that it's not too slick, and it's got a bit of a ragged feel on a lot of the songs," he says.

At first glance, it might seem that a rocker at heart (comparisons to Crazy Horse-era Neil Young are frequent) has just found his groove. But however happy he is with the new sound, Mays isn't abandoning the old one; instead, he's keeping it alive separately. On Sunday, he'll break from a national tour with the band (mostly opening in larger venues for Blue Rodeo) to appear at the Junos by himself in what he calls the "tail end of all the solo album stuff." And his plan, once he's finished promoting the current disc and before recording another with El Torpedo, is to hurry back into the studio to record a second solo effort.

"I think it's going to be a lot different, the next record, and I want to put it out soon - I don't want to do this one-record-every-two-and-a-half-years thing," he says. "It's going to be completely different from this record, but then there'll be another El Torpedo record after that that'll probably be a little heavier."

Mays is walking a delicate balance. It's hard enough for a new act (albeit one who's been working the Halifax scene in one way or another for more than a decade) to achieve the mainstream breakthrough he's hoping for. Attempting to do so with two different musical personas makes it all the more of an uphill battle.

It helps that, despite an avowed disinterest in writing for the radio ("If I try to write a single, it'll sound like shit"), Mays can't help but crank out accessible tunes. The pounding Cocaine Cowgirl has already turned up on playlists nationwide, and ironically, On the Hood - a track he acknowledges is "sort of a dig" at industry pressure to write singles - is slated to be the next single.

It's onstage, though that the affable 25-year-old will make his mark. Not for nothing have he and his cohorts already earned a reputation as a superior live act. Even at a jam-packed and badly overheated Horseshoe, nobody is wishing a speedy end to the extended jams - often with keyboardist Brad Conrad doubling as a third guitarist to assist in a gloriously full sound - that have become the band's hallmark.

Where he takes it from here, though, is anyone's guess. Mays has lately been leaning on Sam Roberts, a close friend and surfing buddy with whom he says he leads parallel lifestyles, for advice on how to handle his burgeoning success. But whereas Roberts seems content taking a relatively straightforward path toward becoming a CanRock institution, his younger friend is still aiming way too high to let us know which Matt Mays we'll be getting for the long haul.