When someone who is famous says that he doesn't want to be famous, it's easy to write him off as a purveyor of false modesty.

Jesse Lacey says he does not want to be famous. Is it a pose?

The day after his band, rock stalwarts Brand New, returned from a nationwide tour, Lacey played at Looney Tunes, his hometown record store in West Babylon, New York. After powering through an intense but short set, he spent three hours signing autographs, dispensing hugs and imparting words of wisdom to the 700 mostly teenage fans that had come to pay tribute. Lacey was unfailingly polite and cheerful, but after the event ended, he seemed baffled by it.

"I can't ever remember being intent on meeting anyone," Lacey says as he settles in to a diner booth. "I think I met Darryl Strawberry once, but that's about it. The kids tonight were very civil, and really sweet, but the reason they wanted my autograph escapes me."

Lacey pauses, orders a soda, and then proceeds to rip a page out of the earnest Eddie-Vedder-circa-1993 playbook: "I mean, if all this fame and touring and record deals disappeared tomorrow, none of us would be upset. I would still come home and make music every night. My dad is a nurse, and what he does every day is so important; he makes decisions that can determine whether people live or die. And essentially, what I do is make things up. I write songs that are make believe. I have seven siblings that fought tooth and nail to get through school, and I'm just floating along doing something I would be doing anyway. I feel like there is so much more I could be doing; I could go back to school and become a teacher and tour during the summer."

For a while, that was Lacey's plan. He was in college when he started jamming with drummer Brian Lane in a basement; eventually, they added bassist Garrett Tierney and guitarist Vincent Accardi, who was 17 at the time. They released their first record, "Your Favorite Weapon" in October of 2001, on Triple Crown Records, and despite almost no critical attention or commercial airplay, it sold half a million copies. The band followed up with 2003's "Deja Entendu," which was pegged as one of the 10 best records of the year by the New York Times and sparked a bidding war, which Interscope eventually won. And then...silence.

"I can't give you one reason why the new record (the recently released "God and the Devil Are Fighting Inside Me") took three years to make," Lacey tells me. "A lot of the kids who like us thought we had some sort of a plan, but that wasn't the case. A lot of the delay was due to us trying to become humans again; we realized we were taking the road home with us after touring. You change the way you relate to people when you're always moving on, and after a while, you have to just accept the shallowness."

Lacey staunchly refuses to accept shallowness at this point, which had led to a near-blackout on interviews (he's done two for the record so far; you're reading one of them). He also refuses to answer shallow questions from fans. "I get kids who come up to me and say, "I've been waiting six years to meet you, and I just have to ask...what's your favorite color?'"' Lacey laughs, albeit wearily. "It's like, who cares what my favorite color is? I'd rather just talk to kids, but I try to steer them away from looking for some sort of deeper meaning in my answer to that question."

He continues, "I get the feeling a lot of them have a more personal relationship with the lyrics than I do. They seem really disappointed when they feel something about a song that I didn't necessarily feel, or they have a heavy experience that they associate with a certain song. It's hard to let them down. People ask where the songs come from, and I often tell them they come from me sitting in front of the TV with a guitar, creating stories."

Lacey drains the remainder of his soda, and then leans across the table. "I have a great story to illustrate this. On the last tour, we were on the bus watching the Mets game, and some kid wandered through an unlocked door. He saw what we were doing, and he looked so disgusted at the fact that we were sitting around watching baseball. He thought we should be cutting ourselves and crying, not drinking beer and cheering. That's the type of relationship we have with some fans; they create an image of us in their heads, and when we're not like that, they hate you. It's jarring."

Despite this, he remains committed to his fans; he didn't spend three hours scribbling his name on their CDs for no reason. He's not going to be pulling any diva-like moves soon, when asked about life on tour, he replies "Getting on stage for that hour is the highlight of my day. We talk to the fans afterward and it doesn't feel like work. Most people dream of doing this, and we're so humbled by the fact that we actually have it."

Is Lacey's humbleness pose? He says he has no desire for the fifteen minutes of dubious fame that has become the new American dream and that you won't find him judging on a reality TV show anytime in the near future. A pose? Who can say? It feels genuine to this interviewer, but more importantly, it feels genuine to his fans. When a kid outside the Looney Tunes show, shivering in near-freezing temperatures, was asked why he came out, he said, "Jesse is one of us, dude."