CITY FOCUS:Singer’s heart is in H.B.

On Monday, Matt Costa got on yet another plane to embark on yet another leg of his musical tour.

But it isn’t exactly the career he imagined.

As a teenager in Huntington, Costa dabbled in music, but his career goals steered toward skateboarding. When he was 18, that path was sidelined by a 10-stair ledge.

“I was skating down this ledge, and I fell and shattered my leg — it was a compound fracture,” Costa, 24, said in a telephone interview from his parents’ Huntington Beach home. “Pretty much I was out for a year. I was on crutches and had two surgeries and a plate and some screws put in.”

With some time to kill during his rehabilitation, Costa dusted off his guitar and began jamming, emulating some of his favorite musicians while he found his voice.

“During that time is when I started focusing on songs and song structure and songwriting,” he said. “I paid more attention. I had always been involved with music and have always been really affected by it, and this was when I really paid attention to the song and what affected me about it and tried to re-create those songs.”

Eventually, he branched out on his own, writing tunes and lyrics about whatever he was feeling on a given day. After a buddy gave him a four-track, he started to record some of the cover songs he’d been playing as well as some original compositions.

“I did another demo in a studio — just two tracks, my guitar and my vocals — and gave that to a group of friends, and eventually that got passed around,” Costa said.

It eventually landed in the hands of No Doubt guitarist and Long Beach producer Tom Dumont. Costa routinely drove to Dumont’s studio and recorded about a song per week and released several thousand copies of an EP. He later released an LP, which was the original version of his March 28 release “Songs We Sing,” released by famous pro-surfer-turned-musician Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records.

“We got to know [Johnson] from being on tour with him, and he liked the record, so he put it out,” Costa said.

In February, Costa began his first whirlwind international tour, making him long to visit the places he was only able to spend a couple of days in.

“You see all these different places. It’s amazing. By the time I was onto the next country, I had just got the basic phrases from the last country,” he said with a laugh. “I was saying ‘bonjour’ when I was in Germany and — I don’t even remember the rest.”

During his brief hiatus from touring, the guitarist enjoyed simply hanging out at home, eating at Fiesta Grill and visiting his parents and Angel, the family dog.

“It’s crazy, you know. I got home, and I haven’t wanted to leave my house,” he said. “And every place I go, it’s like experiencing it new; I kind of look at it in a different light.”

Seeing Europe and Japan puts everything in a different kind of light, in a new perspective, but then it’s also comforting to be home, he said.

In fact, it doesn’t even feel like home; it feels like a vacation spot, he added.

Costa’s voice and demeanor parallel his mellow guitar music and crooning, which carries some of the same tones as the 1960s music he said inspires him. He cites Bob Dylan, Donovan Leech, The Beatles, The Kinks, the Lovin’ Spoonfuls and The Zombies as some of the artists he pays homage to. It wasn’t only their music that played muse, but the intellectual side of the musician and the literature of the time.

“Mostly I wanted to know what books they were reading and what they were inspired by,” he said. “I started getting into Jack Kerouac and the Beat generation, and from there I got into early folk musicÂ…. I think it’s just good to have that reference of where everything’s coming from.”

Absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and in Costa’s case the touring, which he said he enjoys, does make him long for his Surf City home.

“I toured around most of the winter, too, and it was just so cold everywhere,” he said. “I just wished I could be home and at the beach, and since I’ve been home I’ve made it a point to go down to Huntington or Laguna, or wherever, and just go swim.”

Costa will get a chance to swim along the Surf City coastline again when he comes to town Aug. 26 to play the House of Blues in Anaheim.

For more information, visit www.mattcosta.com.