If being a musician is supposed to be a lackadaisical career choice, no one ever told Geoff Farina.The singer, songwriter and guitarist has been in a variety of bands, composed music for films and participated in a musical archive preservation project. He has performed on dozens of recordings, played more than 1,000 shows and coowned a space that gave broke artists a place to live and work. He has studied music in an academic setting and wrote a master’s thesis on the history of consumer analog synthesizers, which he can explain in a way that does not make you feel like an idiot, and he currently works with two bands: Italy’s Roman folk-meets-punk group Ardecore and his recent solo project, Glorytellers. “I think I’m a workaholic,” Farina says, although he believes that viewing his 20year-spanning resume all at once does make it “seem like I’m more prolific than I really am.”

Farina, 39, grew up in Harrisburg, Penn. The city’s sparse music and art scene led the young musician to migrate to Boston to study songwriting as an undergrad at Berklee College of Music, and he has since lived there for about 21 years. Boston was a fertile musical spot for Farina, and it was there that he formed The Secret Stars and later Karate.The Secret Stars began in 1993 as a folk-pop band with Farina’s friend Jodi Buonanno.The duo took a more home-style approach to spreading its music, releasing material initially on cassette tapes. Not long after forming The Secret Stars, Farina began playing with Eamonn Vitt and Gavin Mc- Carthy as the jazz-inflected indie band Karate.The band became known for its extensive touring, a habit that the band formed at its foundation, when the three original members booked what Farina calls “a crazy D.I.Y.-tour across the country” in the early ‘90s.

Farina played with Karate for 12 years, but the group disbanded in 2005, partly due to Farina developing tinnitus. “It just got really bad at some point,” he says. Ending the era of Karate was tough, but Farina says he and his bandmates always knew the project would not last forever.

“We always took Karate on a year-to-year basis,” he says. “We looked at it as something with a lifespan.” The fact that there were no hard feelings in ending the band is evidenced in Karate’s McCarthy now participating in Farina’s Glorytellers.

Although Karate had ended, Farina still wanted to be in a band of some kind and try a new sound. The result was Glorytellers; a predominantly solo project that Farina imagined would have a two-guitar harmony and a flexible lineup of musicians. Farina started writing and recording music as Glorytellers in 2006, and his work showed that the band’s name being so close to the word “storytellers” is no coincidence. Karate specialized in lyrics so abstract that “Someone would ask me what a song meant and I wouldn’t even know,” Farina says. “It was the idea from the beginning to make [Glorytellers’ songs] more narrative.”

Farina has managed to adhere to all of his plans for Glorytellers.The band’s 2008 debut album and upcoming 2009 release, Tongue, show a band with a more narrative lyrical style and a gentle sound focused on guitar harmonies. Farina even managed to swing a rotating guitar player into the mix, with Josh Larue coming in on the first album and now with Mike Castellana, while he and drummer McCarthy remain constant.

With a work ethic like Farina’s, it is no wonder that he has the uncanny ability to make things unfold according to plan, whether it be molding a band in a particular form or getting academia to exercise its flexibility. Farina got his master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts, and while his concentration technically was media studies, he managed to pull together a program that got him researching those consumer analog synthesizers. “I really twisted things around to do what I wanted,” he says. And if his history is any indicator, Farina wants to, and probably will, do it all.

> Glorytellers

June 11, Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 212-253-0036; 8, $8. Also June 12 at Union Hall.

Glory be! Glorytellers.