Music has never made Chuck Prophet rich. There have been times in his life when it didn’t even make him solvent.

But it has made him happy. Sort of.

Prophet performs at the B-Side on March 26.

Chuck Prophet has never “played the geetar on the MTV” and he has never been a guest judge on “American Idol.” And while it is indisputable that “chuck” and “prophet” are both household words, the name Chuck Prophet is not.

What Prophet has consistently done for three decades is write and perform beautiful, intricate and challenging rock music.

It is fitting that Prophet’s email signature reads, “As soon as you realize it’s all insane, it all makes sense,” because he never seems to stop trying to make sense of things.

His career goal is nothing less than redemption.

“I tell myself that if I can make a classic, a real classic for the ages,” he said in a phone interview, “it’s going to make sense of my life; make up for all the evil shit I’ve done. That’s probably a lie.”

Music is hard to talk about if you do it right, Prophet said. The reason most conversations about music turn to paydays, attendance figures and other tabulations is because music is ephemeral, he said.

“They don’t like to talk about things that are ephemeral,” he said.

One of the questions Prophet said he hears most from fans is, “Why aren’t you more famous?”

It strikes this journalist as the king of all backhanded compliments, but Prophet’s answer is that “success came in many forms” in his career.

“I mean, it took all kinds of different shapes,” he said.

When Prophet played in bands in middle and high school, his biggest goal was to “have enough music to play a 20 or 30 minute set.”

“Getting a gig at a club was a huge deal to us at the time,” he said.

Later, when Prophet joined the band Green on Red, success for him had morphed into something equally modest.

“The thing that most impressed me about them was that they had a rental van and a gas card,” he said, laughing. “At the time, that was really bourgeois.”

Green on Red recorded for Mercury Records for much of its existence and Prophet said the label never interfered with the music the band wanted to make.

When he talks about it now, Prophet sounds like he can’t understand why the label didn’t get more involved.

“I don’t know why we got signed,” he said. “It’s hard for me even figure out how we got a record deal.”

The band performed a reunion show in London in 2006, Prophet said, and Jim Bogios sat in for the late Alex McNicol on drums.

“We were taking a cab back to the hotel after the first rehearsal and he was looking at me and he said, ‘How did you guys get a record deal?’” Prophet recalled, laughing.

Prophet didn’t even think of himself as a songwriter early on.

“We were just making up songs,” he said. “Later, I became more aware of “Oh, Jimmy Webb. He’s the guy who wrote all these great songs.’”

Prophet said he hesitates to cite any personal icon because he’s “had so much inspiration along the way, if I mention one person like Jimmy Webb, I’ll leave out 100.”

He is willing, however, to assert that all roads lead to Bob Dylan.

Prophet’s perfectionism as a composer and as an audio engineer is well illustrated by a Dylan anecdote.

He said he was hanging out with a friend recently who records world music and the friend wondered aloud, “What’s the point of doing another take of a song or another revision? No one’s going to be able to tell.”

“He kind of had these absolutes,” Prophet said, “and it was funny because it bothered me.”

The next morning, Prophet said, he read an article stating that “there was gonna be a 40-page draft of the song ‘Dignity’ from the ‘Oh Mercy’ sessions that didn’t make the album.”

“Oh that’s my kind of guy,” he recalled thinking. “That’s why Dylan is my guy.”

Prophet said he is never happier than when he is “wrestling some idea to the ground and getting a verse to have a nice straight line through it in plain language.”

“That’s the kind of the buzz I am chasing,” he said.

Prophet said he thinks in terms of albums, not individual songs.

While writing, he said, he always stands back and thinks, “Is there a record here? Am I tapping into something I never tapped into before, musically or thematically?”

When this reporter pointed out that thinking “in album terms” is an endangered mindset these days, Prophet responded, “I don’t care. That’s the other thing about success. People say, ‘Isn’t it a shame nobody buys albums anymore?’ I don’t make records for other people. I don’t care. I don’t want to be successful.”

Prophet said he continues to strive because he feels like everything is just out of reach.

“Sometimes you go past things and sometimes you fall short,” he said. “But anytime you’re engaged in just trying to get the beast to behave, that’s inspiration.”

Tours are like vacations for Prophet, he said, because it means he can stop obsessing about albums. Except that he never really stops obsessing.

Asked if he ever plays “woulda, coulda, shoulda” after an album is released, Prophet said, “Of course I do.”

“When you play it live, it’s still living and breathing,” he said. “You’ll be playing the songs in Scranton, Pennsylvania in a half-filled bar on a Wednesday night and you’re like, ‘Oh god. If we’d only played it like this when we cut the record.’”

Prophet said he sometimes takes songs out of rotation because he is so disappointed with some aspect of the composing and recording process.

After enough time goes by, he adds the songs back in because he can’t remember what was bugging him about them in the first place.

Prophet’s unceasing quest to make sense of things even extends to interactions with fans.

He said it sometimes seems as if they hate him.

“You’re on tour and they see you play and they don’t really like you,” he said. “They’re sort of like, ‘Oh, I used to be in a band. It’s really hard. You’re really brave.’”

“And I’m like, ‘Really? Does this look hard?” Prophet said. “‘I’m driving around, staying in decent hotels. I’m playing music with my friends. I don’t get it. Does this look hard to you? You should see what my dad did for a living. Now that was hard.’”

Prophet chalks these sorts of conversations up to people just “trying to make sense of their own lives.”

Fans ask for advice about breaking into the music business, but Prophet said he has never really been in the music business per se.

“I don’t have a manager that’s connected in any way,” he said. “I have a wonderful relationship with Yep Rock records and that relationship is: If I can make records, we’ll put them out together.’

“What I am doing here, really, is running a mom and pop business,” Prophet said.