When British singer-songwriter Rupert Wates first came to New York City in September 2006, he found himself in a predicament.

“My credit card was being rejected everywhere, which meant I literally had not a dollar in my pocket,” he said during a recent phone interview from his current home in Brooklyn. “I had the price of a Greyhound bus, which enabled me to get to the West Coast and meet up with my wife, so I crossed America in a Greyhound. If I hadn’t had the money, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Since these humble beginnings in the U.S., audiences across the country have connected with his earnest, folky material and lyrics. Songs from his two solo albums released in the U.S. have been nominated for 12 awards from various organizations and publications, including an honorable mention from the John Lennon Songwriting Competition in 2007 for his song “After the Rains.” And he attributes much of this success to being Stateside.

“It’s true now, more than it ever was, that opportunities are better in America; there are more of them,” Wates said. “I can cover several hundred miles in a weekend and play three to four gigs. In England, if I had gone three, 400 miles, I would have driven off the coast. There’s always more possibilities because of the scale of the place.”

Two performances

He’ll play two free shows at The Moon and River Cafe on Friday and Saturday night, along with Canadian musician Jack Harlan and local player Tim Roden. Wates will also be in town this morning at 9 for a live broadcast on SACC-TV (Schenectady Access Cable Council, Inc.).

Wates has developed a pattern of balancing weekend excursions to smaller markets, such as this one, with two or three longer tours a year. He avoids playing in New York City, preferring smaller, more intimate settings, where audiences are more open to his music.

“I prefer smaller towns because people are much more appreciative, generally,” he said. “At any moment in New York, you’re competing with hundreds of other attractions, so you have to have some kind of shock value to make people pay attention to you. . . . In Schenectady, when I go out there next week, I’ll be on TV. There’s no way that I would have got that equivalent in New York.”

Born in London, Wates became a full-time songwriter in 1992, initially working with jazz singer Liz Fletcher and others before striking out as a solo artist in 2005 while living in Paris.

“I started off writing for other singers because I always felt I wasn’t a natural singer myself,” he said. “It was a big learning curve for me to write for others, particularly jazz singers. You have to learn a whole new language when writing jazz. Also, writing for other singers helps me find my own voice as a singer and writer.”

He grew up listening to folk and acoustic artists such as Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. These influences are readily apparent today in such story songs as “Prisoner of the Open Road” from his 2005 solo debut “Sweet or Bitter Wine,” and the Nick Drake-esque “Elegy For the Coming Man” off his latest, last year’s “Dear Life.”

“[In folk], you need to be self-reliant, and that fact of being self-reliant leads you to write songs that tell of individual experiences; songs that tell of lonely lives, isolated lives,” Wates said.

“I’m finding myself drawn to those subjects. There’s a nice kind of cross-fertilization between my life and what I’m writing about: traveling a lot, seeing different people, it all feeds into what I’m writing about.”

Although “Dear Life” was only released last fall, he is already working on his next full-length, which he says will be even further in the storytelling vein.

New material

Drawing inspiration from anthologies such as Paul Auster’s “True Tales of American Life” and old newspaper clippings, Wates is working on a set of songs “rooted in American life,” told from an outsider’s point-of-view.

“They’re all simple stories that mostly take place in small towns, Midwestern people writing stories having to do with issues in America’s past, such as segregation, the after-effects of the Civil Rights movement and how it’s still remembered 40, 50 years after, the Civil War, going back even that far, and the two world wars,” he said of Auster’s anthology. “But they’re always told with a lot of specific detail.”

But Wates is taking his time writing material — he doesn’t plan to start recording until February of next year, and will be looking for guest singers to help flesh out different characters in the songs.

“It takes quite a long time to find the material,” he said. “I wanted to give myself a much bigger span of time.”