James Duke is a soft spoken guy, tall and thin with a broad smile that spreads from ear to ear. He’s the kind of guy who, when asked if he plays the piano, answers with a laugh and says, “That’s a funny question.”

Duke, 21, lives in an apartment on a second-floor loft in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the city where he grew up and currently studies business at Western Michigan University. He shares the space with seven other guys who, like him, are musicians.

On a cold Wednesday afternoon in early February, Duke sat before a set of large, uncovered windows looking out over the snow-covered street below his home and spoke about his minimalist alter ego, Lovestranger, MD, and how he kind of plays the piano…but not really.

“Most of the Lovestranger stuff is the white keys,” he says, standing and turning to hover over an old electric organ stationed in the corner. “Most of the songs are just played with two fingers.” He holds a few keys in succession, his large fingers enveloping each one, creating a melody at once infinitely simple and emotionally complex — in other words, a melody that’s signature Lovestranger.

Duke began playing music around the age six or seven, when he started playing drums. His dad is a dedicated multi-instrumentalist, and eventually Duke would play drums with him in a number of different bands. Over the years, he would come to play in a number of bands of his own, but never as a songwriter or in a role that provided any direction. That all changed when he found a toy Casio keyboard at a thrift store in 2007. Inspired by some friends who were “goofing around” and making music for each other, he decided to use it to write music.

“I was coming up with all these excuses for not being able to make an album or write music, write songs that I liked,” Duke says, “and these kids, they didn’t have really nice gear; they were just using someone’s computer to record, but they were writing great songs every day, amazing pop songs, and they weren’t super complicated.”

Duke found himself listening to his friends’ music — created with instruments that were “mostly toys” — all the time. He decided to stop being so serious about his songs and started to record the music that would become that of Lovestranger, MD with friend Nic Harris.

“We didn’t take it very seriously; it was really just for our friends,” Duke says. “We didn’t really think it had much musical merit at all, it was just kind of like, sit down, play a few really easy notes on the keyboard, and sing a love song about someone that you might have really liked or something really stupid that doesn’t matter at all. We were just having a lot of fun with it.”

The two used two toy keyboards — they found a Yamaha at another thrift store — added some drumbeats using a computer, and recorded five or six songs, then “didn’t really think anything about it.” Eventually Harris got married and moved south, leaving Duke on his own.

In 2008, Duke was approached by Michigan-based Dinosaur Club Records — which releases full-length albums on cassette tapes — and was asked if he wanted to submit some music. Over the course of two weeks on winter break that year, using just a computer and two $5 thrift-store keyboards, Duke wrote and recorded the full-length Spaghetti Ohs for Dinosaur Club.

With nine tracks topping out at just over 18 minutes, the result falls somewhere between the hushed, measured vocals of David Bazan (of Headphones and Pedro the Lion) and the electronic soundscapes of The Postal Service.

“The mission of it was to just be really sincere — not in a super serious way, but in a genuine way, just saying, ‘This is how I feel, this is how I feel about you. I miss you. I don’t miss you.’ It’s kind of childish in a way.”

If the music truly is childish, it’s childish in the sense that it’s genuine without being self-conscious.

“Remember in the 10th grade when you made that mixed CD,” Duke sings on “Bandshell.” “Secrets hidden inside other peoples’ poetry/and when I listened to it I felt like you wrote the songs for me.”

The album is a snapshot of the acute, familiar ache that is American adolescence, especially adolescence in the Midwest, with its gas station coffee, landscaping trucks at dawn, and Jesus.

“The leader says to close our eyes/we should try to visualize/what does Jesus mean to me,” Duke sings in “Mechanic on the Beach,” in a voice and with a theme that’s a dead ringer for Bazan, who Duke counts as an influence. “He’s a mechanic on the beach/with cigarettes and yellow teeth/his jacket smells like gasoline.”

As cars lumber slowly by in the slush outside, Duke says the Lovestranger album gave him the confidence to embark on his current project, an Americana/psychedelic pop band using “real” instruments called Son Drop. He released his debut Son Drop album, Deep in the Underbark, late last year.

“I don’t want sound pretentious about myself by saying this, but I think I kind of stumbled upon what is good about music,” Duke says about his work on the Lovestranger project. “It helps you distill that emotion and figure it out, and if you do it well, other people can even relate to it and celebrate it. Even if your music is being played on a little toy keyboard.”