Just a couple of weeks ago, on Sept. 27, Matthew Sweet released a new album, “Modern Art.”

But on his fall tour that comes to the Blind Pig on Wednesday, Sweet will depart from the usual music-biz practice of playing a set full of tunes from the new record.

Instead, he’ll be playing his classic 1991 “Girlfriend” album in its entirety—plus some bonus tracks from the album’s mid-‘00s Legacy Edition—to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of “Girlfriend,” which became a power-pop classic, was a breakthrough disc for Sweet and his career—and influenced many bands that followed. The show will also include a few tracks from the new album, he says.

The idea to perform the entire “Girlfriend” album "just kinda popped into my head last year, that it might be cool to do, to commemorate the album being 20 years old,” says Sweet. “I started asking people, ‘Should I do the whole album live?’ Now, once we were learning it, I thought, ‘What was I thinking?’ But seriously, doing the record live is comfortable and fun; I think people will enjoy it.

“I do look back fondly on that album, and on those recording sessions, so I just got the idea to play all of it, to celebrate the anniversary,” adds Sweet. “At first, I thought it might be strange, like I would be entering a time warp, but playing all those songs again feels very normal to me, so I guess that’s a testament to the album’s timelessness.”

No guff. There are a few reasons that the record still holds up as a classic. For starters, there was Sweet’s savvy popcraft, melodic gifts and his knack for creating hooks that grab your ear and wouldn’t let go. And then there was the “power” aspect of the disc’s power-pop appeal—provided mostly by the alternately bristling, inventive, crunching, sinewy and rippling guitar work of Richard Lloyd (formerly of Television) and Robert Quine (previously of Richard Hell and the Voidoids.)

During those sessions, Lloyd and Quine generally didn’t play together, on the same song. “I mostly used them on different tracks,” notes Sweet. So, the heady, inspired guitar interweave we heard on songs like the bristling title track, and “I’ve Been Waiting” and the exhilarating “Divine Intervention”—three of the album’s most popular, standout tracks—was between Lloyd and Sweet, or between Quine and Sweet, depending on the song.

“Richard played on the ‘Divine Intervention’ and ‘I’ve Been Waiting,’ and Robert played on the title song,” recalls Sweet during a recent phone interview from his home in Los Angeles.

The guitarist in Sweet’s current band, Dennis Taylor, “does a great job of re-creating those parts onstage,” says Sweet. “I’ve never had another guitarist who could approximate both Richard’s style and Robert’s style as well as Dennis can. He’s been around a long time, has a great ability to improvise and really take a seat-of-the-pants approach.”

That’s the approach Sweet took when working with Lloyd and Quine, recalls Sweet. “I’ve always been a ‘play what you feel’ guy,” says Sweet.

As for “Modern Art,” his new album, it also showcases Sweet’s well-honed melodic sense, and we can hear the influence of his main musical touchstones - the Beatles, Big Star, the Byrds…..

But on this disc, he decided to take a more experimental route than usual.

In the past, Sweet’s general approach was to record music ideas when they occurred to him, and then later shape them into final songs, discarding some of his original ideas. “I would make deliberate changes to the song structures and normalize things, but this time, I wanted to make it sound abstract but still human and natural.”

So this time out, he “based several of the songs on the earliest incarnations,” he says. “So, on the final version you hear on the record, you’ll hear a melodic section in a song that I don’t return to again, or you’ll hear a vignette that doesn’t show up again.”

Also, if a musical idea came to him in the studio, he and his band in many cases would develop it into a song right on the spot. “We approached a lot of the guitar parts that way, and in some cases, when you work like that, things can start to fall apart, and then the guitarist has to navigate his way back to the main structure.

“It was definitely a challenge, to take an abstract approach but still have it wound human and natural. It’s easy to just subvert things, but I also like really personal music, so I wanted these songs to retain that quality, even though we were messing with the structure.”

Sweet is also prolific. Not only is he already at work on his next album, it’s about two-thirds finished, he says. “After the abstract approach I used on ‘Modern Art,’ I wanted to do a concise, simple record this time. The process was quicker, and there are more fast songs on it, but also some garage rock.”

Sweet likes talking about his influences - the bands that were most inspiring to him, and he is especially effusive when discussing Big Star.

“Big Star was like my ‘American Beatles,’” says Sweet. “In my mind, Alex Chilton was a John Lennon type of guy, who could write about a wide range of emotions. I could never have made ‘Modern Art’ if I’d never heard Big Star’s 'Third.'”

Kevin Ransom, a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com, can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.