It’s 8 p.m. on Friday, and beneath the stage of Chicago’s Abbey Pub, Miles Kurosky is eating his dinner. Beulah’s first-ever headlining tour is somewhere in its middle stages, and there is no immediate end in sight.

“We’d tour in hell,” he drawls, fighting a cold with a plate of Irish fish and chips.

For the San Francisco sextet, touring used to mean warming up stages for Wilco, Luna, Guided By Voices and the like, but Kurosky won’t miss being the bridesmaid.

“[Headlining] certainly validates your being in a band more, makes you feel better,” he says. “It’s a bit miserable sometimes, opening for bands that are huge for $250 a night. You don’t see the actual physical rewards. You hear about it, you think, ‘Oh! We might have introduced ourselves to a lot of people and they might be buying things.’ But are they? I don’t know.”

“Touring is twofold, isn’t it?” he rationalizes. “It’s one, yes, to entertain people, but it’s also for business. You’re trying to introduce yourself. Some people say, ‘You win them one fan at a time.’ But I’m just not of that mind.”

Winning fans by the thousands sounds more agreeable. By Kurosky’s estimate, Beulah’s new offering, The Coast Is Never Clear, has sold around 20,000 copies in more than a month.

“We’re happy,” the singer says, “but I should figure there’s a few more thousand fans out there …”

It’s hard to imagine anyone hearing Beulah and not becoming a fan. Both Coast and its predecessor, When Your Heartstrings Break, come filled with beautiful, subtly orchestrated pop music that sounds a bit like Belle and Sebastian writing songs for Pavement to play.

“Popular Mechanics For Lovers,” the advance single for Coast, nicely encapsulates the Beulah sound particularly well, entwining Kurosky’s hooks and prickly lyrics with Bill Swan’s horn arrangements and an instant-hit chorus. But despite its unabashed beauty, this music may simply overshoot what modern radio wants.

“I do think we’re doomed to a certain underground status,” Kurosky says, “but I’m not necessarily disappointed with that.”

“Popular rock ‘n’ roll has been bad for the past twenty or thirty years anyway, and I’ve come to accept it. Most folks in our country like bad music. They like a certain simplicity, a certain … crap basically. And I’m not about to force anyone to hear something they don’t want.”

But for those who do want what they offer, Beulah delivers. They play ill (as Kurosky did here in Chicago), they invite audience members onstage and, for the first time on tour, they get to take encores. At the Abbey show, Kurosky even introduced a young flutist who showed up at enough shows to be unofficially added to the band.

“You can see how low the bar is to join this band,” he joked, but in truth Beulah is taking her all the way back to San Francisco with them.

Upon learning that the Abbey show has sold out, Kurosky seems pleased. Beulah will introduce themselves to 500 people this night, and make $10 a head in the process.

“There’s no such thing as a sell-out in our book,” Kurosky says affirmatively. “The whole point is to sell out — in the best possible way — meaning to reach as many people as possible.

“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” he continues. “It’s not to be unknown. I mean that’s just madness. Utter fucking madness.”

A madness he shouldn’t have to worry about much longer. nyou