Benjamin Booker is a rock star, but the blues-rock upstart still doesn’t feel like one—with his white-lightning launch to fame, he hasn’t really had time for an adjustment period. Critics drooled over the 25 year old’s 2014 debut LP—a garage-fidelity blast of searing guitar crunch and Delta-rich moan—and he’s spent the last half-year turning heads at major festivals and touring with one of his musical heroes, Jack White. Still, the whole thing feels, well, “weird.”

“I’m definitely more present when we’re on the road than I was at the beginning, when it was very blurry,” he says. “But this is all such a surprise. I know the support is there if I want to do this again, but I also feel like maybe I should start looking for jobs. There are labels that say, ‘We’ll put out your record—it’s fine.’ But also, maybe I should think about going back to school. It’s hard to think you can keep doing this for a while.”

A major eye-opener came during a packed April show in Washington, D.C. “It was the biggest club show I’ve ever done,” he says. “It was 1,500 people, and it’s like, ‘Wow, you guys came out to see me! That’s crazy.’ I’m not at the point where I’m completely comfortable or confident about that kinda thing.”

Booker spent his teenage years in Tampa, Fla., soaking in the city’s punk scene. But writing songs was never on his agenda. He studied journalism at the University of Florida, with the goal of pursuing a career as a music writer. And after graduation, he relocated to New Orleans, where poverty and personal drama finally inspired him to craft his own, heavily introspective songs like “Have You Seen My Son?” a gritty open letter to his worried parents, and the acoustic centerpiece “I Thought I Heard You Screaming,” which explores auditory hallucinations and a fractured relationship with a drug-addicted roommate.

“You can’t write songs if you don’t have anything to talk about,” he says. “I got older and had more experiences and things to say. It’s not that I didn’t want to write songs before—I just didn’t know how to do it. I’m pretty self-critical sometimes. I’d done music journalism and was a big music fan, but I didn’t want to make bullshit songs. Sometimes people need to get the bad stuff out to get better. But I just waited. And the songs came.”

Booker built on the momentum of his first album with Live at Third Man Records, a Nashville, Tenn.-concert set that more accurately reflects his explosive strengths. “I needed to do it,” he says. “The live show is so much different now than when we recorded the album. No matter what you do in the studio, it’s weird and a little uncomfortable. You have headphones on, and there’s a guy behind the glass. But that show—there was a few hundred people that came out, and we did what we always do. It’s a little more aggressive live, and the songs are twice as fast as they are on the record.”

Though he has a stash of riffs and general ideas, the singer-songwriter hasn’t set a timetable for his next album. Booker needs distance and perspective to write songs—and his touring schedule hasn’t been accommodating. But whatever comes next, he hopes it will deviate from the sound that launched his burgeoning career.

“[Psych-rockers] Tame Impala have a new record coming out, and the first song they released has no guitar on it, which is crazy,” he says. “Obviously I want to build on what I started, but I do hope it’s different. The people I look up to aren’t even musicians—like writers. I want to have a similar life but in a music edition.”