Wasps and White Roses, the new EP by Matt Bauer, features enough flora and fauna for another remake of Doctor Dolittle—or a Robyn Hitchcock album. Over just seven cuts, Bauer mentions buffalo, cherry blossoms, bullfrogs, grass, raccoons, geese, wasps, roses, sea lions, daffodils, owls, snakes... and that only takes us as far as track 5. Yet Bauer, who plays Georgetown's Jules Maes Saloon on Wednesday, April 5, swears it wasn't part of an intentional scheme.

"Much of the material I've been writing of late, even new stuff that is not on this CD, is about animals," he says from his current home in Brooklyn, New York. Still, he sees nothing unusual about that; his muse likes to follow trends. "For a long time, everything I wrote was about trains and cars. Now it's all horses and birds and snakes."

Other qualities distinguish the disc besides its affinity for the natural world. Although he is a gifted multi-instrumentalist (on the Wasps EP, he plays acoustic guitar, two types of banjo, piano, drums, flute, and glockenspiel), Bauer constructs these rough-hewn folk songs—including two instrumentals—from a bare minimum of materials, often playing single-note melodies or singing a cappella.

He is not, however, always singing alone. On the dusty opener "Carve It Out," he is joined in harmony by his former San Francisco neighbor, Jolie Holland. (She also loaned him her piano for the recording.) Such impromptu collaborations happened more than once when the two lived near each other, Bauer recalls. "I'd be going for coffee, and she'd be headed for the post office, and we'd run into each other, and someone would say, 'I have this thing I have to record...'"

Even with all its woodland denizens, Bauer's EP—the follow-up to his 2004 full-length Nandina—is hardly storybook fare... unless we're talking about the dark, twisted lore of the Brothers Grimm. On his rendition of the traditional "Heap of Little Horses," Bauer's voice sounds exhausted, almost like a condemned man singing in solitude to pass the time. Of course, if you're a fan of Tom Waits or Ohio outfit the Black Swans (Bauer toured with the latter), that's a good thing indeed.

Wasps and White Roses includes another traditional, "Sea Lion Woman," augmented with new, original lyrics. Under the circumstances, it was the most promising recourse available. "I learned that one off this old LP, Afro-American Blues & Game Songs, but it only had a snippet of two little school girls, singing just the chorus," he recalls. "I liked the song so much, but I wanted to sing something a little longer than 40 seconds."

Growing up in rural eastern Kentucky, Bauer had a pet horse, and his parents kept a vegetable garden, but music has always been his primary love. Except for that very brief period when he dreamed of becoming—surprise—a veterinarian. "That was just something I wanted to do when I was little," he laughs. "Doesn't everyone go through that phase?"

kurt@thestranger.com