Even across hundreds of miles and notoriously unreliable cellular connections, there’s no mistaking that Vance Gilbert has a voice to be reckoned with. From the first “hello,” it’s clear that this man demands to be heard.

Vance Gilbert is, in short, a singer-songwriter with roots and influences in jazz, soul and pop. But as a rule, he gets thrown in with the rest of the folk troubadours armed with acoustic guitars, an association that will bring him to the University of Northern Iowa and the airwaves of radio station KUNI.

“I guess they’re one of the few folk stations in the country that play folk seven days a week or something or other. I’m excited about that. That’s great!” he exclaims.

In the middle of the interview, Gilbert actually manages to catch one of those time periods, one that just so happens to feature him.

He cries out, “They’re playing me right now!” as he turns up the radio.

“Oh man, please. I go into self-examination when I hear it coming across the air. Oh God! Can you hear it?” he jokes.

Gilbert got used to hearing the sound of his own voice while cutting his teeth on the scene in Boston and quickly rising through its ranks.

“That was a real seminal ground for this acoustic folk music thing,” he says. “You get kind of inundated with it. If you were carrying around an acoustic guitar, this is the place to be.”

Gilbert says that while he wasn’t always on the singer-songwriter side of the spectrum, there were a few folk who paved the way and made it slightly easier for him to get started.

“Tracy Chapman was the queen of the wave before I got into this. She really made a splash in the mid-’80s and I really wasn’t doing this at that point,” he says. “I was really more into being a jazz-pop kind of singer. I wasn’t really into a singer-songwriter kind of thing. And now look at me. Now look at me, for God’s sake!”

Gilbert’s first Maintenance Shop show has been some time coming. But Gilbert says that he doesn’t plan on tailoring his show to provide a proper introduction.

“I don’t think it’s incumbent on me to try to catch everybody up to where I am and where I started,” he says. “I think we’ll still have a great time if we catch me at this point in time. There’ll be some of the old hits that I’ll do, I guess, but I have some new stuff that I want to play because that’s where my voice is now. It’ll be a good feedbag.”

Gilbert does acknowledge that some people in attendance might not be familiar with his work, while some others have been waiting to hear his songs for years.

“You think ‘Well, God, this is a totally new crowd. Should I do the stuff that I used to do?’ Nah, I’m going to go out there with the me that I am at this point. I’ll throw that out in to whatever crowd, I suppose, and hope they stay.”

For a good view at what makes Gilbert the way he is, take a look at a few contemporaries and cohorts that he calls “essential listening.”

“James Taylor is a given, along with anything by Shawn Colvin, anything by Ellis Paul,” he says. “Let’s see, anything by Patty Griffin. Martin Sexton is somebody that should not be missed.

“Some of those people are more vocalists than writers — some more writers than vocalists. But all in all, that is a good smattering of the people I call contemporaries. Yeah, that’s a good start that you’ve got there.”

Gilbert says that he tries to walk the line as far as vocal and compositional notoriety goes.

“I’m always known more as a vocalist, I guess, but I always strive to be a better writer,” he says. “It’s always worked for me to try to be the better writer.

“Between you and me, it’s the songwriting that lasts forever. That’s where you really leave your mark. A great vocalist can sing any song, but it’s really the great song that is the litmus test, the flash point for all of this.”

Gilbert’s voice and songwriting have done well for him in the music industry, including a beneficial relationship with Grammy-winner Colvin.

Gilbert explains his success this way: “I tell people that I’ve gone from absolutely unknown in this business, all the way up the ranks to randomly obscure.”