Singer-guitarist Brian Whelan exists at a critical artistic intersection, one where sweetly acidic irony and heartfelt fealty to American musical tradition overlap for a particularly engaging form of personal expression.

Inescapably classified as this town’s top country/Americana stylist (due largely to a five year stint in Dwight Yoakam’s band), Whelan trades in an individualistic brand of kicking Southwestern rock & roll that’s loaded with an arresting appeal.

“A lot of people think I have a country band, but I don’t think that’s true,” Whelan says. “It’s an oversimplification to call it country — it’s rock & roll with pop song writing and a distinct country influence. I love American roots music and my favorite is 1950s rock & roll and it always goes back to that — a garage band playing 2 and 1/2 minute pop songs— so I do have those twin powers in my band.”

As “Rock & Roll Dream,” the song premiering here demonstrates, Whelan’s music is thrown down with a deep streak of Holly’s luminous ebullience and a spicy twist of Chuck Berry’s elegantly tailored, meter-caressing lingua rocka, but the prickly message and slightly dog-eared delivery are Whelan’s alone.

It’s a thoroughly satisfying concoction, one that the musician has been developing since  childhood in his native Washington state.

“I was born in a suburb of Seattle and my mom and dad got me into ’50s music as I was a kid,” Whelan says. “I saw La Bamba and The Buddy Holly Story and they got me all these Buddy, Elvis and Eddie Cochran tapes — that got my started. I began taking taking piano lessons at 8, was in garage bands as a teenager, so it’s pretty much been my life’s work.”

He reached Los Angeles in 2000, earning a B.A. in music at USC and joined indie rock band The Broken West shortly after graduating.

“I was the bass player and harmony singer,” Whelan says. “We toured and toured, did two records, so I learned the ropes without my own name on the line — I could make my mistakes in relative anonymity.”

Along the way, he wandered into Culver City honky tonk the Cinema Bar, heard Mike Stinson and Tony Gilkyson and was never quite the same again. The two musicians represented post-Palomino Los Angeles country’s highest flowering and Whelan found himself being thoroughly inculcated.

“I fell in love with L.A. roots music,” Whelan says. “I started going back through the history we have of that, and I went from being a fan to playing with these guys.”

The bassist gig with Yoakam followed shortly thereafter, a job which soon expanded in a characteristically unusual manner.

“Dwight asked to me learn  to play steel guitar, which I did,” Whelan says.  “It was a unique experience to get paid to learn an instrument but Dwight is just enough of a wild man to do it. I had a short window, just a few months, so the first time I played it was in front of 3000 people . . . and I still don’t know how to play it.”

Whelan parted ways with Yoakam after a few years, just as his brilliantly emotional, sardonic second album Sugarland was released and the Whelan rep has been steadily ascending ever since.

For Whelan, it’s still often a “voice in the wilderness” syndrome, where clueless Gram Parsons-fixated hipsters are unable to comprehend anything beyond the country classification.

“Country is so great because it’s really durable,” he says. “And it can take these injections from outside and survive and stay counry — like it did with R&B and rock & roll and, now, hip-hop and EDM — but it’s always country, an amazingly durable genre.”

All that matters, of course, is the quality of his songs and there’s no quibbling about that. Whelan hits hard, striking at heart, mind and soul and the impact is mighty.

“What I do has a lot to do with artistic control,” Whelan says. “As a sideman, people have been telling me what to do my entire life, so I don’t let anyone to tell me what to do.”

Whelan is the consummate modern Westerner, the rugged individualist, beholden to none.

“If I’m producing someone and they say ‘my manager doesn’t like this new song,’ I tell ‘em to get a new manager. I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do — and that includes the market place.”

Brian Whelan plays on Monday, July 15 at Good Times at Davey Wayne’s.