Think you’re busy? Big whoop—you should meet Brendan McLeod. The garrulous 30-year-old is convening with the Straight at Prado Café on Commercial Drive to discuss his new album, Little Troubles, Live . But the conversation necessarily fans out in a dozen directions, because McLeod is among the most prolific artists in the city.

Little Troubles, Live documents McLeod the spoken-word performer, storyteller, standup philosopher, solo musician, and (now retired) slam poet. By his own admission, it’s “a terrible time” to launch the 13-track live album, because he’s only two months away from the release of Find Me , the second full-length from his folk band, the Fugitives. Meanwhile, a third project called the Gist, a mix of music and spoken word, debuts in September.

All of which tends to undermine McLeod’s long-term ambitions as a novelist. He snorts that there are “five terrible novels in my basement that I’ve never shown anyone”, but The Convictions of Leonard McKinley —presumably his sixth effort—happened to net McLeod a prize at the 2006 Three Day Novel Contest and a 2008 Re:Lit nomination. “I’ve been trying to write another book for about three years,” he mentions, a little glumly. “It’s so laborious. I’ve really fallen behind on fiction writing.”

There’s more. McLeod also runs writing workshops, has an upcoming curatorship at the Cultch (for which he’s penning a play), and has cofounded Awesome Face, a very odd endeavour that even the wordsmith confesses is “hard to explain”.

“It’s a kids’ group for adults,” he says of the quasi-musical quartet. “It has Show and Tell, and Nap Time. At 11:30, we try to get a whole crowd of bar patrons who are drunk on a Friday night to go to sleep—it’s deadly serious.”

McLeod recalls one hapless punter walking into Café Deux Soleils during Nap Time, barking “Holy shit!” and then fleeing the place. “It did look like a suicide cult,” he says with a giggle. “That’s the beautiful thing about Awesome Face. You can just do some weird shit.”

Indeed, although McLeod’s weirdest shit to date took place outside the Vancouver Art Gallery this past January, in the Tackle Me for a Dollar performance-art project. That’s when people were invited to pay a buck for the privilege of pile-driving him into the ground, which some 18 passersby did—including two Mormons, to make matters even stranger—all of it caught on tape and then looped at the Public Lounge on Main Street for two months. To McLeod’s mind, the effort was distinguished by its utter pointlessness.

“Some people actually got mad at Tackle Me for a Dollar,” he says, frowning. “They thought it was for charity or something, but it wasn’t for anything except fun.”

Not that any of the above has a specific bearing on Little Troubles, Live , except to illustrate that McLeod appears to be something of a creative typhoon, one with a fairly bent sense of humour. Oddly, in talking about the album, he’s keen to emphasize how dull he is. “I’m not that exciting a guy,” he pleads, explaining that it can sometimes take a long time to drum up three or four minutes of material based on his life.

Be that as it may, on Little Troubles, Live —which launches at the ANZA Club on Wednesday (August 26)—McLeod is definitely a funny guy. “Animals Seeking Attention” is a torrential six-minute rationalization of why girls should make out with him. “Adventures in Second Life” describes an attempt at virtual gay sex that was interrupted by his mom. (“It was just a whole other level of ‘How do I explain this to my mother?’ ” he says in the interview.) And “The Ultimate Love Story” uproariously addresses what happens when you “gamble on a fart, and lose”.

“You want some things that draw you immediately into an album,” he reasons, “and crapping your pants is one of them.”

A handful of songs, such as the Bright Eyes–esque “All This Trouble”, round out the disc, up until the bombshell last track, “Handling Knives”, which brings the full brunt of McLeod’s sensitivity to a gut-crunching final act. He makes an excruciatingly raw and shocking confession in the spoken-word piece and then breaks down in the midst of it. Revealing any more about this exquisitely uncomfortable piece of performance—if such abraded honesty can even be called performance—would be wrong. He’s a charmingly silly creature, but “Handling Knives” demonstrates that McLeod also strives for deeper significance. For his part, the performer hopes that revealing what he tearfully describes on the album as his “secret” is “going to be helpful in some way”.

“I think there’s gotta be something to that,” he says. “If there isn’t, then there’s nothing to anything.”