With many kinds of music, including the blues, the material often serves as a vehicle for instrumental virtuosity.

That's not how Robert Cray looks at it.

"My playing is kinda taking a move more toward the song, as opposed to music [being] a background for the guitar," says the 55-year-old guitarist and Columbus, Ga., native.

Cray, who brings his band to Hartwood on Sunday to close the Pittsburgh Blues Festival, is touring behind an album, "This Time," that will be released next month on his own Nozzle Records, a subsidiary of Vanguard Records. This will be the second recording on Nozzle but the first studio record; three years ago he came out with "Live From Across the Pond," based on a series of shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London during which he opened for Eric Clapton.

Cray, raised in Army bases around the country, became interested in music as a teenager and formed his first band in 1974. A high school friend had turned him on to such blues luminaries as B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf.

"At 16 all this stuff was pretty cool; I just thought it was great. That was the first phase; you pick up on the groove," Cray says. "The subject matter [comes later -- with time] you always hear something different, or feel something different."

Cray got his recording break four years later.

"We played at the San Francisco Blues Festival as the Robert Cray band -- Albert Collins joined us." A producer who was in the audience hurried them into the studio to record the first album, "Who's Been Talking," but it ended up sitting on the shelf, not being released until 1980. That was the first of 18 recordings, which have netted him five Grammy Awards, most notably for his 1986 release "Strong Persuader."

And if you're a blues purist -- well, Cray and his cohorts just won't give you what you want. The songs "Chicken in the Kitchen," "Trouble and Pain" and "That's What Keeps Me Rockin' " from the upcoming album do justice to traditional blues. However, "I Can't Fail" incorporates a gospel feel and "Love 2009" is a soul ballad.

"We always delve in the blues vein" but don't stay there, Cray says. "It's why we [also] play the R&B thing."

And true to his philosophy, the songs are the stars. The inspiration for the ballad "Forever Goodbye," which Cray wrote with his wife Sue Turner-Cray, for example, was the loss of her mother and his brother. Even on the other material the band never falls into all-out jamming.

As such, those who do make it to Hartwood on Sunday will not simply hear Cray and a bunch of back-ups. All the material on the new disc is original, written by him and his band members -- keyboardist Jim Pugh; original bassist Richard Cousins, who rejoined the band after 18 years; and drummer Tony Braunagel.

"I encourage everybody to bring stuff in," Cray says. "We all like a lot of different stuff and we all like similar stuff."

However, he's still the boss -- "I have to be the one to say, 'This song isn't going to be on the record.' "