Ahead of Salinas show, Kiefer Sutherland gets personal.

After Kiefer Sutherland’s blockbuster movie roles, famous drinking episodes, time in roping and rodeos, runaway stardom as Jack Bauer of TV drama 24, music label management and now work as a touring musician, you can make a compelling case he is uniquely qualified to talk about reinvention.

When he does, he evokes David Bowie, just a couple of days before the singer’s death. Bowie purists needn’t worry: Sutherland proves too grounded about his career and his new band to compare himself to Bowie musically.

“Bowie totally did it in the context of being an artist, very aware of what he was doing and why he was doing it,” Sutherland says. “Not me. My reinventing came out of necessity.”

He goes on: “When my film career went to shit I decided to do something else. When 24 did really well, I had extra cash and music was a passion, and I was seeing great artists not getting signed because the record industry was getting this colossal shift, and I realized there was an opportunity to help.

“I’d love to say it was part of a larger plan or an artistic concept like Bowie. It’s not. For me, reinvention is solely born out of interest in those things – it’s more ADD – and it kept me alive in a way that, as I look back on my life, if something horrific happens to me on the way home, in the last second I’d go, ‘This has been awesome.’ A lot of people would say something else. There’s not going to be a lot of should’ves in my last moments.”

When he appears at Fox Theater in Salinas Saturday, Jan. 23, he’ll visit his last moments, in a way, with a song called “It’s My Last Night.” The audience eavesdrops as he voices a final letter to a lost love from a prisoner sentenced to death.

“Writing these words don’t come easy to me/ but I’ve run out of time and soon I’ll be free,” he croons, part Tom Petty, part Americana, part saloon rasp, with Sutherland at his best with ballad-like, country-leaning songs like this one.

That’s not a coincidence. Petty is clearly a primary influence. He also cites Hank Williams.

“Petty always had such incredibly simple lyrics that manage to drive a narrative of a song home to your heart,” he says. “It reminds me of Hank Williams – albeit a different generation and genre – but both knew how to tell a story.”

Storytelling runs throughout his career, and right into his songs: “If there’s an extension from actor to musician,” he says, “it’s something about music I’ve always loved: the ability to tell story. It wasn’t the action, the fighting, the girl: I loved idea of a story that affected me.”

His songs come driven by his experience, experience he calls “very personal.” They also resonate with themes of loneliness, loss and resilience. On “Can’t Stay Away,” he admits he’s “Walkin’ in the wrong direction/ Know I should be walking home/ Smart enough to know much better/ Tough enough to be alone.”

When his friends dug it and asked what woman he sang of, he said it was his older daughter.

Only she called B.S.

“She said, ‘That’s not about a girl, that’s about a bar up the street.’ I talk about that in my set. It’s about the time in life when the bar felt like my girlfriend, which is not always a good thing. The song is me trying to explain that to myself.”

He accesses other tough times, with songs like “Calling Out Your Name,” a song about his first real love of his life (“It didn’t work out, for a variety of circumstances,” he says, “and it was a very public thing”); “Down in a Hole” (“I had friends who got into a lifestyle and paid a real price; writing a song helped me deal with it”) and “My Best Friend” (“There’s a moment you realize, to get yourself out of a ditch, you’re the one shot you got at it”).

The content stirs up something familiar from a conversation the Weekly had with 24 co-creator and Monterey native Bob Cochrane as the show’s popularity was exploding in 2006. Cochrane called Sutherland “a very smart guy,” adding, “I’d seen his work. And he projects an inner demon that we liked.”

The Sutherland conversation roams from there – from family work ethic to L.A. punk bands to pop culture to Picasso. You get the sense the show will enjoy a similar depth and accessibility. But since there won’t be a ton of Q&A, it was important to steer our talk toward other important items, like Jack Bauer (his unforgettable anti-terrorist operative in 24) and The Lost Boys (a breakout hit shot in Santa Cruz).

His favorite Bauer moment: when he must mail proof of an assassination.

“I had to say, ‘I’m gonna need a hacksaw,’ and I had to do it 10 times to say it without laughing.”

His strangest fan interaction: when a man dropped down his chimney. “I wasn’t in town, and I got a call from the fire department, saying they might have to knock down the chimney.”

On The Lost Boys: When they cast the extras as vampire bohemian types, they told everyone who showed up to appoint themselves how they would normally. “They didn’t have to dress a single extra.”

Get the full transcript of the interview, including his favorite myth he hears about himself and his favorite movie project, at www.mcweekly.com/culture.

THE KIEFER SUTHERLAND BAND plays Fox Theater Salinas 9pm Saturday, Jan. 23. 8pm doors open. $15 general, $25 VIP. 241 S. Main St., Salinas, 758-8459, www.foxtheatersalinas.com