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Somehow, when talking to Wil Wright of East Tennessee band Senryu, you want to ask him to do his impersonation of Michael Corleone from “The Godfather, Part III.”

You know the one — the quote that “Little” Steven Van Zandt made famous as gangster Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos.” The one where he fixes the fellow members of his crew with a steel-eyed gaze, pounds his chest and says, “Just when I thought I was out ... they pull me back in!”

Not that Wright, stringy blonde hair cascading past his eyes, looks, or even sounds, like Michael Corleone. Or Silvio Dante, for that matter. But when it comes to Senryu, there’s something about the band that Wright just can’t seem to put to rest. Two years ago, he talked about the band’s 2005 album, “pssst,” as its swan song. Last year, after a prolific several months of writing and recording, he again broached the subject, testing the waters of calling it quits after the release one more record, which would have been titled “The Guilty Party Rages On.”

Now, after a triumphant performance at New York City’s famous nightclub The Knitting Factory and an upcoming show on Monday night at The Pilot Light — all on the heels of a successful fall tour opening for Chapel Hill, N.C.-based indie pop band The Physics of Meaning — Senryu seems poised to get even bigger. And Wright, at last, has given up talk of pulling the plug and made peace with simply hanging on for wherever the ride takes him.

“Every time we talk, it feels like it’s the end, and then right after we talk every time, something out of our control, something good, usually happens,” said Wright, calling from somewhere outside of Maryland on the trip back to Knoxville from the Big Apple. “Unless a band is disbanding because somebody in it has a baby or has to deal with cancer, there’s no real sense of urgency. Just because you feel like you’ve done a lot of stuff and want to go out on a high note, there’s no reason to rush things.

“Since proving that Steven (Rodgers, co-founder and the band’s drummer) can do it as just the two of us and whoever wants to join us, it makes it a lot easier, and now, it’s really out of my control. It’s bigger than just me and Steven. Playing the show in New York was sort of a reminder of that — people actually drove from Knoxville to see us, and that showed me that it’s bigger than us, that it shouldn’t be our decision whether it’s over.

“Maybe this band is undead; I don’t know,” he added. “I just don’t think it’s my call any more.”

Anyone familiar with the band knows that, since its inception in 2001, Senryu has taken on a life of its own. It evolved out of the ashes of another group called Roof when Wright hooked up with Rodgers and drummer Seth Barber to form the backbone of Senryu. “Stars and Garters” established Senryu as an experimental pop-rock band but quickly became a vehicle for Wright’s musical vision. After recording “Bathtub of Broken Glass” in 2003, Wright shifted into overdrive, signing the band with local label Disgraceland Records, recording an EP (“Down with the Sugarpills”) of songs he wrote with his sister as a child and recording a solo album before taking the band into Don Coffey’s Independent Recorders studio to cut “pssst.”
Barber departed after the tour to support “Broken Glass,” and Wright and Rodgers, after several changes to the band’s lineup, finally gelled with Emory Barnett on bass and Lori Maxwell on keyboards. However, the aftermath of “pssst,” and the disintegration of Wright’s personal relationship with Maxwell, meant backing up and revisiting Wright’s and Rodgers’ ideas of what Senryu meant — what it is, and what it could be.

The answer came last year in the form of several recordings — nine, in fact, since “pssst” was put out two years ago. Most are EPs — “A Pose I Can’t Hold,” “Blink Blink,” “Welcome to the Pantomime” and the extended EP/short full-length “The Guilty Party Rages On,” which has yet to see the light of day among fans. In addition, there are a handful of Internet-only singles and downloadable projects, and more in the works. Credit it to a number of things — the manic energy Wright possesses, a fervent love of the recording process and the mad scientist vibe that Wright and Rodgers give off as creative partners.

“I’ve always thought of Steven as the mad scientist, and I sort of think of myself as this inventor who’s always inventing something that works but always wants it to work better — it’s like taking this beast that works and moves and breathes and deciding, ‘We need another arm,’ or ‘We need a machine gun on it,’ or ‘We need to give it new legs,’” Wright said. “We keep building this thing, and it gets bigger and crazier and weirder and weirder. Steven and I are completely, fundamentally different people, but we’re never satisfied.

“We’re satisfied with the process, but not the results. I’ve given this band its last rites a bunch of times, and every time I do, it sort of rolls over and crawls off the bed. We’re both super-busy now in different ways, so with that will come a lot more recording and fewer, but more calculated, shows. It becomes a game of quantity vs. quality. Before, we sort of over-saturated the market, making it something that fans couldn’t get away from. Now, we’ve learned to only do the things that matter, so we’re going to record a whole lot and get around to releasing them digitally. The Internet is really going to be our friend.”

Already, Senryu has its first quarter of 2008 mapped out. For now, it’s rest and recording — the two plan on hitting the studio upon returning to town to record an EP of “in-between” songs, Wright said — tracks that the two wrote but fell by the wayside in between all of the other projects. There’s also the question of what to do with “The Guilty Party Rages On” — a masterpiece that’s all too brief.

“I’m really glad that we held off on releasing it, because I stopped listening to it after we recorded it, and I’ve just now sort of rediscovered it,” he said. “There are more songs inside the concept of it that I didn’t take the time to dig out, and I want to pull a few more of those ideas out and extend them. I’m really excited about that.

“Looking back, it seems silly that we released that much music last year. It seems like every couple of weeks we were saying, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s another one!’ I know we’re not going to impress anybody with the bulk, but by the time I’m finished with something, I’m ready to get it out and move on. As the music gets faster, so does our creative process, and it feels like we move so fast sometimes that we miss some of our opportunities.”

Re-examining the pair’s creative process, Wright said, was one of the high points of the recent trip to New York. No doubt, the future of Senryu — whatever it may hold — will include a sharpened focus on that process, as well as a “tightening up” of older material. Wright wants to dig back into “Welcome to the Pantomime” and release it nationally; in addition, there are plans for a spring tour with The Physics of Meaning and a shot at Austin’s prestigious South By Southwest Music Conference in the spring.

It’s exciting. It’s heady. And it’s scary as hell, Wright admitted.

“I’m scared of everything, and playing music is my only confidence sometimes,” Wright said. “I use that to document things that I’m afraid of, or at least to communicate what it’s like to be afraid.”

And maybe that’s the key to the ongoing adventures of Senryu — maybe Wright, soulful musician-poet that he is, hasn’t quite figured out how to unlock the secrets of his own heart, how to completely bare his soul on stage in a way that’s mesmerizing to the audience and terrifying in its vulnerability. Maybe that’s what keeps him going — that elusive goal, that light at the end of the tunnel.

If that is the case, as gorgeous and wonderful as such a masterpiece will be, many of the band’s fans no doubt hope he never gets there. Or at least takes a long time to do so.

“Obviously, at some point it’s all going to come to an end,” he said. “We just want to play everywhere we want to play and record everything we want to record beforehand. The Knitting Factory on New Year’s Eve was amazing — that, to me, was the top of the mountain. When you’re in a band, you sit around and wonder what the best show to play could be as far as the venue and the audience response and everything going well, and the Knitting Factory was it.

“But who knows what 2008 will bring? We plan on being so much more productive, and really, Senryu sort of takes care of itself. It’s gone to a lot of places, gone through a lot of phases, that I could never have predicted.”