The first thing you need to know about Somerville-based singer/songwriter Josh Ritter is that there are two of them. The first Josh Ritter is a shy, sheltered kid from Moscow, Idaho, who grew up taking violin lessons. Years later, when he heard Boston was a good place to play music, this Josh Ritter made the bold leap — to Providence.

"I was afraid of living in a big city because I thought New York and Boston were, like, war zones," he admits. So every Monday and Tuesday night for 13 weeks straight, he drove in from Providence to Cambridge to perform at open mikes at the Kendall Café and Club Passim. And then drove home again. This is also the Ritter who, petrified at the thought of asking out a girl he liked in high school, strummed a guitar in his bedroom instead — and who later daydreamed about giving a tape of songs to Bob Dylan.

The second Josh Ritter is a self-possessed, fast-emerging 25-year-old artist who laughs easily and feels most at home in front of crowds, a young man who’s already carving out a name for himself in Ireland thanks to a spate of recent tours and a musical friendship struck up with the Glen Hansard of the Irish band the Frames. This is the Josh Ritter who, after performing a song in front of 20,000 people waiting to hear Bob Dylan, was invited by Bob to stick around on stage. Ritter didn’t have a tape with him, but he did manage to pass along a copy of his soon-to-be-released CD, Golden Age of Radio (out January 22 on Signature Sounds). Hard to imagine that only a handful of years before, he had barely even heard of the man who would light his musical path.

"I had never really listened to much music — Top 40 radio and AM radio was all that I had heard," says Ritter over a pint at the Plough & Stars the day before he launches a month-long residency at the Lizard Lounge (he’s there the next pair of Wednesdays). "I didn’t have any records until I was a senior in high school, and one of the few records my parents had was Nashville Skyline. It was like an epiphany. It was like getting a look at something I had no idea about. It was like a key that was unlocking this door."

He began writing songs, and when he left for Oberlin College, he began performing them in public. "I was really shy, but I started to just play and play. And learning to get over that shyness was a big thing for me. I feel like maybe being on stage is a fuller representation of who I am."

What becomes clear when Ritter steps to a microphone is that one Josh Ritter is inseparable from the other. In fact, it’s that alchemy of seeming opposites — humility and ambition, guileless wonder and quiet conviction — that gives an emotional heft and unvarnished truth to his performances, and to the dozen tracks that make up Golden Age. There’s an openness and a sincerity at the core of his music that suits Ritter’s temperament and his dusty, conversational twang just right.

In Ireland, he’s already been compared to such heavyweight storytellers as Bruce Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine. Like those artists, he’s a traditionalist who blurs genre lines among folk, country, and pop, bringing to mind kindred spirits like Gillian Welch, Tim Easton, and a less bratty Ryan Adams. "However anybody thinks of this music is fine with me. Some people say it’s like alt-country. I’ve never really listened to that stuff — it just hasn’t really hit me. But if you think of Gillian Welch as being alt-country, then maybe it is."

It is and it isn’t. Just when you think you’ve got him figured out, Ritter sheds one stylistic skin and slips into another. On the verdant "You’ve Got the Moon," he breathes his words like the ghost of Nick Drake. But yeah, the countrified "Me & Jiggs" is the showpiece, a balmy promenade about old times and old friends drinking beer under trees that’s built around the loose-limbed strum of acoustic guitar and nicely unkempt slide guitar.

The album, Ritter says, is about "scared determination," transition, and life’s troubling in-betweens. "There was so much uncertainty moving from Moscow, where I lived all of my life, to a new city where none of my friends were. It was a really hard time. I hoped people would understand what I was trying to say about being frightened, and doing what you love in life because it’s all you really want to do. And that no matter how scared you are, you’re going to keep doing it."

Josh Ritter performs this Wednesday and next, January 23 and 30, at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. Call (617) 547-0759.