The dictionary definition for “troubadour” tries to have it both ways. On the one hand, we’ve a troupe of lyric poets, chiefly Provençal or north Italian, spinning their yarns from the 11th to the 13th centuries. On the other, more prosaically, Collins says: “Singer.” It’s entertaining to wonder whether, in the 1270s, Aix-en-Provence witnessed the equivalent of a gimlet-eyed James Blunt figure hogging all the choice gigs, while the real deals, the innovative wordsmiths, huddled in freezing grottos, reading their rave fanzine reviews by the light of a flickering candle.

Presumably, rivalries and wildly varying commercial fortunes held sway then as now. But it is the modern-day troubadours stirring the new-year pot, the male singers with a touch of the lyric poet about them, who concern us here. There is little detractors can do about wan warblers such as Blunt and his unlovely chart offspring, other than evangelise even louder about the less successful but more innovative alternatives. So let’s do just that.

As the box (right) indicates, contemporary troubadours are in fine fettle and producing some of the greatest music currently being heard in Britain and Ireland. And the 26-year-old Dubliner Fionn Regan is one of the most exciting ambassadors. Not, you understand, that he cares to view it quite that way. Chuck him a query about where he sees himself and his work in the old Bob Dylan-Nick Drake-Jeff Buckley scheme of things and he’ll smile charmingly. Then answer a different question.

This is a man whose conversation matches the songs on his debut album, The End of History, for allegory, metaphor and simile. His gnomic responses often end up chasing their own tails, heading towards the cornicing like smoke rings (you see, it’s catching), switching between the descriptive devices without warning, extending them well beyond their comprehensibility, but never imperilling their winning whimsicality. If you think that sentence was lengthy, try one of Regan’s own verbal riffs.

Here he is on why it took him so long to make the album (he released his first two EPs four years ago; The End of History finally surfaced last July): “Let’s say that I was doing things by committee, you know? And that had to fizzle out in order for me to be able to move to the next station.

I arrived at a station where I thought, ‘I’m here now, what I’ve got to do is build the ocean liner with a butter knife.’ And that takes a lot of time when you haven’t got the power tools or the crew. So everybody’s going, ‘What’s he doing? He’s going into the harbour again to work on the boat.’ And now it’s like we’ve left the harbour, and it seems to be floating okay.”

A pause, for breath. “I wanted it (the album) to be like the conversations that I have,” he continues, “the things I think about, that I sit around tables like this and talk about. I don’t want to have to go off the country road onto the superhighway. Because maybe I’m riding a Honda 50 and I’m not allowed on the motorway anyway.”

Not surprisingly, Regan has an arresting way of dealing with the old songwriters’ dilemma — either follow in those Dylan-Drake-Buckley footsteps, and get damned with pale-imitation praise, or take the shilling of compromise and reign supreme but derided at the top of the charts. He could, he admits, have made things much easier for himself. “But it’s not like I’m going to go down the shed and knock up a box for someone who wants it, say, 6 by

4. There was a lot of ‘Who are you going to get into bed with?’; people saying, ‘If we’re going to get into bed, I want you to perform this trick’, and me working out whether I wanted to perform it... and deciding that I didn’t.”

That anecdote highlights one of the key ingredients of the true troubadour, which is an ability to stick like a limpet to your vision, even if it restricts you to country roads. In Ireland, where he was the first signing to Damien Rice’s Heffa label, Regan is feted as a fine exemplar and has been nominated for two prizes at next month’s Meteor awards. A limpet he certainly is: the dread self- editing hand is entirely absent in his work, which at its best is as fearless, as idiosyncratic, as Dylan. “Ideas are like sparrows,” he sings on the song Hey Rabbit. “They dart down the halls, the chimney/And out of the spout/ Down the worm hole and back out of my mouth.”

He’s wary — and who can blame him? — of being bracketed. “The whole singer-songwriter thing is like a neighbourhood,” he says. “And if you’re from that neighbourhood, everybody thinks, what? Say there’s a house No 13 and a house No 5: are the interiors going to be the same? Is the atmosphere going to be the same at dinner time? Who likes a sherry before bed, and who likes a cup of cocoa? People go ‘I don’t like singer-songwriters’, and you say, ‘Have you got any Bob Dylan records?’ ‘Oh, yeah, I love Bob Dylan.’ Well, he’s a singer-songwriter. I feel that my job is not to be hammered into shape.”

The End of History was one of our albums of the year, and featured in numerous other best-of-2006 lists. The new year should see this momentum gathering speed. Whether he’s boarding a train, sailing an ocean liner, riding a Japanese moped or darting down a worm hole, somehow you know this wonderful musician will find an original way of describing the journey. All we’re required to do is listen. Lyric poet or singer (or both), Fionn Regan is always going to have a tale to tell.

Rapping at your doors