Millsap’s songs informed by Pentacostal upbringing

Parker Millsap said he was in an “apocalyptic head space” when he started work on his latest album, appropriately titled “The Very Last Day.” Its songs are set in a violent but colorful world of revival preachers, hustlers and two-bit criminals, recalling images you might recognize from the Southern Gothic of Flannery O’Connor.

“I was living in a small town of about 10,000 people in Oklahoma. I was an hour and a half away from my parents, about an hour away from my band,” Millsap said. “I was kind of isolated. … I got a piano from my aunt that used to be in an old church, and it was kind of out of tune. I had a few of my old church hymnals and I started messing with those – those simple pentatonic melodies. Those are all over the record.”

Millsap, who performs with his three-piece backing band at the Bartlett on Monday, was raised Pentecostal, which explains the guttural, fire-and-brimstone immediacy of his music. Though Millsap is no longer associated with the church, “The Very Last Day” is steeped in ecclesiastical imagery.

“I’m gonna take you down to my house on the Styx,” Millsap growls on the stirring album opener “Hades Pleads.” “You could rule over the underworld.” “Tribulation Hymn,” a stylistic bookend that closes the record, imagines the Rapture: “It was just like the lightning / That flashes East to West … Just like the Bible / Just like I’d been warned.”

“The church affected me in every way, but musically, a lot of it is in the energy,” Millsap said. “That’s the only way I know how to describe it. When you’re in church singing, you’re in a congregation. You’re not singing for a crowd, you’re singing for a higher cause, if that makes sense. You get used to singing without self-consciousness.”

“The Very Last Day” was recorded in Maurice, Louisiana, and mixed in Nashville with a small group of musicians, many with whom Millsap has played for years. Its shuffling drums and twangy guitar conjure the spirit of everyone from Eddie Cochran to early Elvis Presley, and it’s certainly more rock-influenced than its predecessor, a self-titled LP released in 2014.

Two years can often seem like an eternity between albums, but the gap between the 2014 album and “The Very Last Day” has allowed Millsap to better appreciate the older collection of songs.

“I’m proud of them both,” he said. “The self-titled record, I like it more now than I did three months after it came out. … But I feel like the new record is more listenable. It’s a little less heavy-handed in some ways.

“I wrote a lot of the songs (on the last album) to be arranged for a three piece, and once we got in the studio we dressed them up. With this record, we went in with the drums in mind. Writing the songs, I knew we were going to have drums and I knew I wanted to play more electric guitar.”

That electric influence likely will define Millsap’s music in the future, though he said he won’t start on a new batch of songs until this tour ends. He said his creative periods come in bursts, and that his typical plan of attack when it comes to writing is simple.

“The best bet is sitting down with a yellow legal pad and a guitar and just messing around until something stumbles out,” Millsap said. “Once I get a solid idea, even if it’s just a sentence, I think of it almost as a ZIP file. You have to unpack it from there – what can I pull out from this one sentence? That’s a weird way to put it, but that’s how I think of it.”

Millsap’s songs might pack a lyrical punch – he often leaves the sanity of his characters and the very state of the world hanging in the balance – but he said the vibe of his live show is breezy and laid-back.

“My band and I, we’re just four guys from Oklahoma who are kind of lucky to be doing it at the level we’re doing it,” Millsap said. “But yeah, it’s relaxed. T-shirts are welcome.”