Ask most singer-songwriters about how their careers got jump-started, and this is not the answer you get.

At the end of his four-year term in the British military, James Blunt recalls over a bad overseas phone connection, it was time to put his lifelong musical ambitions into action. So "I went into my commanding officer's office, saluted, handed him a demo CD, and said, 'I'm going to go and do this.'"

For the record, it actually took a few more months for the 28-year-old to find his musical footing.

It was a slow build from last October's release of his debut CD, Back to Bedlam, to becoming this month the first artist in five years to simultaneously top the U.K.'s album and singles charts for five straight weeks. But as Blunt tries to spread his homeland success across the globe, it's his past that everyone wants to talk about.

It's a funny balance Blunt is trying to strike. On one hand, he wants us to know he's about much more than his days as an army captain, which included a trying deployment to Kosovo and a stint as a mounted guard for the Queen. On the other, that experience has played a huge role in sparking the public's interest, lending him a gravitas that his music - while promising enough to deservedly draw David Gray comparisons - doesn't quite achieve just yet.

The solution he's come up with seems to be to focus most of his lyrics - aside from looking back on Kosovo in No Bravery, Back to Bedlam's final and most powerful track - on his life outside the military, but to good-naturedly give reporters what they're looking for when they want to talk about his time in the barracks.

"I don't mind talking about it, because it is interesting," he says philosophically. "I guess music can be quite boring to talk about - you should be listening to music, rather than talking about it."

The thing is, while the album makes for a pleasant soundtrack to romantic dinners and musically ambitious coffee shops (Starbucks is already on board, sticking a couple of tracks on one of its compilation CDs), the more that Blunt talks, the more one suspects he'd have a lot more to say with his music if he let himself.

This is someone who toured around war-torn Kosovo with a guitar strapped to his tank, then ruffled feathers by breaking with family tradition - generation upon generation served in the army - in favour of the arts. "My father was obviously really nervous about me leaving my job," he recalls, "and kinda said to me, 'Look, you've got a steady job with a steady income and career prospects - this would be a foolish thing to go and do.' But I was pretty determined about it."

Unlike the bevy of artists who wax eloquent on the horrors of war without ever having been anywhere near it, Blunt's experience lends him an endearingly nuanced perspective on current events.

Before arriving in Kosovo, Blunt recalls, "I wasn't really quite sure what the politicians' motives were - whether they were doing it for themselves, or whether they were doing it for the reasons they were saying. I was also unsure about whether we were being told the truth by the press, because you go to a different country and you hear a whole different story. The only time I really understood what was going on was when I got in there, because the locals - be they Kosovo Albanians or Serbs - would tell us they were incredibly grateful that we were there and were saving thousands of lives - that our presence was really necessary."

For now, though, Blunt has no interest in dwelling on such matters in his music; to do so, he insists, would make him boring.

"Any kind of life experience will affect me, and that's obviously a pretty strong one," he says. "But I'm going through a roller coaster of a life right now, so I have plenty to write about."