Two episodes from the life of New York singer songwriter Jeffrey Lewis in 2015.

In the summer he posts a short video of a typical day in the life of Jeffrey on one of his never-ending tours.

Travelling light, crammed into small hire cars and staying in fans’ houses to cut down on costs the camera catches our lo-fi hero sleeping on the floor at the end of a bed in a space that would have irked a cat.

Fast forward to a fortnight ago and he releases a new CD, Manhattan, that as well as being brilliant could be one of the great New York albums of all time.

That’s Lewis for you. Seemingly contradictory, dodging mainstream success with expert ease, a delicious secret.

But the kip on the floor and the brilliance cannot exist without each other. The hard floorboards fuel his outsider take on life, his bitter sweet songs adorned by the sharpest, wittiest lyrics to be found anywhere in the pop/indie/anti-folk(more on this one later) world today.

“You could end up at some weird-seeming person’s house and find out that it’s a really great place, where you discover some incredible books on their shelves and you can sleep in as late as you want and they have a wonderful friendly dog, or a fireplace, or they cook you some sort of cool weird local dish for breakfast,” Jeffrey tells The Argus by way of shrugging off our concern for his sleeping arrangements.

So who is Jeffrey Lewis for those who have not been lucky enough to stumble upon him?

A nudging 40 year-old steeped in the Lower East Side of New York who turns downbeat, self-deprecating observations sung in croaky off-kilter voice into life-affirming things of joy with just a guitar and a small band of kooky friends. It’s quite a trick.

Oh and he’s a brilliant comic book artist and nerdy aficionado of the form too.

In Jeffrey World nothing quite works out as it should. Girlfriend’s get scratchy, you always get stuck with madmen on the train, success remains distant and the pay as support on tours is always crummy. Kanye sized self-confidence it is not and it is all the more spirit lifting for it.

“I do think that what I do is sometimes hitting an artistic or emotional spot that I’m really personally proud of, but I don’t think my relatively small position in the music biz is any sort of tragedy, after all I’ve been making a living from this for almost 15 years now, which is whole lot better than a lot of artists in history who were much better than me could say for themselves,” he says.

Lewis has been associated with New York’s anti-folk movement right from the start despite no-one really knowing what it means, especially him.

It is a loose association of singers and sounds that a quick trip back to the soundtrack of cult movie Juno would reacquaint you with. Everyday life turned into three-minute vignettes, the almost twee swirling with the almost acid.

I only find out he is tired of answering questions about his genre of music after I listen to a lyric on Manhattan which bemoans journalists constantly asking him what the hell anti-folk means which is of course long after I have asked him what the hell anti-folk means.

“I’m very lucky that people call me “anti-folk” because at least nobody knows what it means, so you can’t hear that description and walk away thinking you already know what the band is about,” he says.

Also read: Jeffrey Lewis interview: The full transcript

And so to his latest CD which will get at afternoon airing at Brighton’s Hope and Ruin next month. It is astonishingly good with all the usual Jeffrey tropes but he’s taking it to a higher place.

Fifteen years on most musicians are on the downward, but not Jeffrey. He’s been building up to Manhattan. There’s more nuance, depth and profundity and a bit more of his local hero Lou Reed in the background.

It starts with Scowling Crackhead Ian, a evocative, melancholy tale of how the singer and the local bully are the only two from school still living on the block and never drops from there.

This new rich vein of song writing, he says, is down to a couple of factors.

He had a regular band for the first time in ages last year and he converted songs from Sonic Youth’s debut album into Shakespearean-style sonnets last year.

It gave him he says “a stronger confidence in the idea that if you just sit and think long enough you can find a way to say anything within any chosen rhythm and rhyme scheme.”

As for Lou?

“I wasn’t specifically trying to sound like Lou, but I guess anybody from New York who is sort of talk-singing ends up sounding a little bit similar? “ he says.

“I have a big picture of Lou on the wall in my apartment, he has a sort of ambiguous expression, it can look like he’s slightly grimacing or slightly grinning, depending how you glimpse him out of the corner of your eye. I like to think he gives me the little smile when I’m writing something good, and he’s giving me the disapproving grimace when I’m not.”

And so Jeffrey Lewis keeps going, driven to get better and better at his art and music.

Still sleeping on floors, playing hundreds of gigs a year, he is in Bournemouth the same day as Brighton, selflessly eluding the Big Time so he can remind us what’s its really like to be alive.

So what keeps him going?

“I’m like a gambling addict at a slot machine, pulling the handle over and over, no matter what it costs me, because I know that the occasional pay-off when those rollers all fall into place and the jackpot hits, it’s a success that justifies all the failures and it’s enough of an emotional pay-off that it keeps me hooked and trying for more, through an insane amount of near-misses and total failures,” he says as if writing another classic Lewis lyri.

December 5 is the next chance for us in Brighton to get a glimpse into Jeffrey World. Just not too many of you please.

Jeffrey Lewis and Los Bolts plus support at Hope and Ruin, Queens Road, Brighton on Saturday, December 5

Doors open 1pm. Tickets £11. www.thejeffreylewissite.com.