Peter Wolf, the former J. Geils Band frontman and resident Boston rock star, is apologizing for the pasta. "Man, this is well overcooked," he says, shaking his head over the meal, which he has offered to "throw together" at his place because his favorite restaurant, Via Matta, is closed on the Sunday night we’ve chosen to meet and talk about his sixth solo album, Sleepless (Artemis; out this Tuesday, September 10). I’ve never been to Via Matta, but I’m thrilled it’s closed, since it can’t be more interesting than Wolf’s treasure-stuffed Back Bay apartment. Walls of music and books, art, antiques (he has a 1955 Seeburg jukebox in mint condition, for one). Mementos everywhere, some more obvious than others: zebra shoes from J. Geils’s "Sanctuary" tour; a tape reel sitting on a stack of books with the first recorded version of songs that would end up on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

The food’s good here too. I think he’s wrong about the pasta, which seems al dente to me, but if he insists it’s overcooked, it’s overcooked. Wolf has me convinced he’s the kind of person who knows what he’s talking about, which is saying something, because an hour into the evening we’ve covered some ground. His library, which winds all over the apartment in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, is a shrine to music, poetry, and art (he hails Chaim Soutine as the "Jimmy Reed of painting," digging out his favorite book to flip through it). While he was cooking dinner, we had a kitchen chat about corporate mergers and the forsaken integrity of the music industry ("Picking someone’s pocket and killing them are both crimes — it’s a matter of degree"). We’ve talked about politics, the fine art of gin drinking (he can quote filmmaker Luis Buñuel, among others, on this subject). Radio. Wiseguys — he knows a few of these, having come up as a performer in "bucket-of-blood mob joints." He and Sinatra both tend to like them.

We’ve talked about his good times in Nashville, the Boston bar scene, the Bronx, where we both grew up, in different ends of the borough. Knowing a little bit about the Zelig-like quality of Wolf’s life — he seems to show up in every snapshot — I’m not surprised to find he has a couple of stories that take place in my old neighborhood. One involves the young Wolf drinking "the whole bowl of punch" at the Riverdale home of a future college president he’d befriended while passing himself off as an art student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. It’s a typical sort of Wolf story, strung with entertaining subplots and incidental cameos, and inevitably it veers into the subject of music, albeit around a rather wide curve. (The Riverdale friend lived near Arturo Toscanini’s house, which he’s also visited, but that’s another story.)

Wolf has a lot of stories to tell, none of them dull, over the course of a five-hour evening (after dinner we make a couple stops on his late-night social circuit). He’s a fascinating person to be around, both because of his life-long passion for music (which he seems to know as much about as anyone in town) and because of his incredibly informed life as an artist and all-around adventurer. He has had close friendships with so many iconic musicians — the Rolling Stones (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whom he entertained in Boston last week, appear on his new record), Van Morrison, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, and on and on — that it’s kind of shocking to hear he never met Elvis. "I came very close. Because the ex-wife [Faye Dunaway] was a tremendous Elvis Presley fan, and one night we were listening to Elvis, and she decided she was gonna call him right then. She left a message that she wanted to talk to him about ‘Hurt.’ It was one of those things where it was like five or six in the morning." Wolf’s phone rang a few hours later, and he thinks he might have heard the King’s voice for a second, but he picked up the call an instant too late.

He remembers exactly where he was the moment he heard Presley’s voice the first time: eight years old, on a Bronx sidewalk, listening to "Heartbreak Hotel" coming through a window. He refers to Elvis Presley as "the hydrogen bomb."

Wolf’s idea is to wait until after we’ve eaten something before settling into the how-and-whys of Sleepless, but we get around to it eventually. It’s a rootsy, subtle, intelligent record, true to his musical soul. Along with the two solo albums that preceded it, Long Line and Fool’s Parade, it underscores his transformation, in recent years, from bar-band/arena-rock showman to intimate stylist and critic’s darling. He describes the process of making Sleepless with obvious affection, from its conception in his living room, where he tried out songs with his co-producer and keyboardist, Kenny White, to the recording sessions at Sear Sound in New York. He talks about every musician on the album — they include Shawn Pelton, Duke Levine, Tony Garnier, Cornell Dupree, Larry Campbell, and vocalists Ada Dyer and Catherine Russell — with warmth and respect. And the songs — which he says were chosen by feel, for their ability to connect singer to song as though the two were born for each other — all have backstories close to his heart, as told in his liner notes.

Yet he has no great expectations about the album’s commercial prospects. "This record was made with a kind of nihilistic sensibility, because I put a lot into Fool’s Parade, and that came out of a time when my record company [Mercury] was being swallowed up in this big corporate conglomerate. Here was this company that had the Platters, Dinah Washington — this great independent, small company. And now it’s getting gobbled up, and Motown along with it, and Interscope, and A&M, and Island . . . it was all this incredible bloodbath. Coming out of that, having put a lot into Fool’s Parade and just seeing it die on the vine, I had a pessimistic sensibility about it all. So I just made this record figuring, ‘I have a lot of different interests, a lot of different roots, and this is the painting I feel like painting right now.’ And what’s the single? There is no single. I wasn’t thinking of hooks."

There are hooks on Sleepless; they’re just quiet hooks. It would be a pleasure to run into any of these songs on commercial radio at drive time — the rootsy lead track, "Growin’ Pain," say, or "Nothing But the Wheel," the one with Jagger, which sounds like something off Exile on Main Street. But he’s right: that’s not likely to happen. And yet Wolf is a radio romantic, still devoted to the ideal of radio — the radio Jonathan Richman sings about in "Roadrunner"; the radio Lou Reed sings about in "Rock and Roll." We’re in his car (a black Audi Quattro, if you’re interested), heading for a nightcap at 33 (he says they make a fine mojito). His favorite radio program is on, Bill Clark’s Music Heaven, a Sunday-night oldies show on WATD 95.9 FM. He never misses it. He loves Music Heaven not only for the obscure doo-wop nuggets — he’s thrilled to hear something he’s never heard before — but because it’s so thoroughly, eccentrically regional. "Listen to that," he says joyously as the nasally Clark talks about the "chats" — that is, the "charts." "Where else do you hear a DJ talk like that anymore?"

The "disintegration of music, as we know it," he says, has everything to do with this. "There was regional radio, regional records, regional studios, regional record companies . . . regional consumers! There was the Detroit sound, the New York sound, California . . . the Southern thang, Southern rock. Hip-hop started in the Bronx. I know a lot of these guys who started it, but they’re not there right now. Now it’s a global commodity."

On the radio, Bill Clark is sending one out to Gwen from Steve, Ray Charles’s "This Little Girl of Mine." "See, this DJ and the passion that’s on this radio show give me hope, because as long as things like this are around . . ." He doesn’t finish the thought because he’s started singing along, tapping his palm on the wheel.