There’s a considerable helping of male guilt on Bring Me Your Love, Dallas Green’s sophomore studio release under his solo City and Colour banner.

Death, insomnia, and alcohol dominate an album that builds on 2005’s Sometimes. But in the opening track, “Forgive Me” (a preemptive letter to a future ex-girlfriend), “Confessions” (hand-wringing over a one-night stand), and “What Makes a Man?” (the confessions of a sad fuck-up), Green is also laying the conflicted psychology of the Y-chromosome-burdened half of the world on the table.

“I’ll be 28 in a couple of months,” Green tells the Straight when reached at his Toronto home. “And I wrote my teenager songs. That was my first record. So when you’re reaching your 30s, and you’ve been around a little while—I decided to kinda analyze myself, and see my own faults for what they are.”

For those who don’t know, Green is most responsible for putting the emo in screamo stalwarts Alexisonfire; his is the pretty voice that comes floating like a fresh soul out of the Canadian quintet’s car-crash dynamics. He pulls a variation of the same trick in his solo efforts. The guitar is acoustic this time, but Green often pounds on it all the same, using his angelic pipes to soften the impact. He also brings a band onboard for Bring Me Your Love, providing a polite, sensibly rockin’ gusto to the single “Waiting”¦”

The formula has been astoundingly successful. Green will play two nights at Toronto’s Massey Hall when his tour swings back east again next month, and he’ll be headlining above Cat Power at Hogtown’s annual Rogers Picnic in July. He thinks the bill is ass-backwards, but after some prompting allows that, clearly, “Things are going well.”

“For the last while, a lot of popular music has been nu-metally, angsty stuff,” he offers, in an effort to explain City and Colour’s appeal. “On the other side of the spectrum, you have manufactured pop music. Maybe kids just wanna hear somebody being honest.”

For Green, bearing his soul is apparently a habit. “I’ve always written that way,” he says. “I’ve tried to write story-type songs, and I’ve tried to bring in characters, but I just can’t do it. Every time I try to, I feel kind of silly.

“I wonder if I should write more opinionated songs on things in the world,” he continues. “But then I wonder, ”˜What will it really do?’ If I sing ”˜Stop the War’, George Bush is not going to. I’d rather just sing a song that maybe will help somebody get through just one day.”

There’s more to Green’s songwriting than that, however. As the shimmering adult pop of closing track “As Much As I Ever Could” suggests, there’s a soul man beneath the tatties, and an interesting strategy for dealing with the interior life of a heterosexual male.

“That is definitely my attempt at making a Sade song,” he laughs. “I love her. I’ve always loved her. I think secretly I always wished I could be a soul singer in an R & B band. I’ve always wished I could sing like a big black woman. That’s my goal.”

City and Colour plays the Orpheum Theatre on Wednesday (May 21).