Dangerous denizens of the swamp include alligators, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and Blue Rodeo.

The songs are good on The Things We Left Behind—so good, in fact, that Blue Rodeo has had to make its 12th studio release a double CD just to contain all of the gems that writers Greg Keelor and Jim Cuddy have come up with this time out. Yet, as strong as the songs are, the stories behind them are sometimes even better, as the Straight finds out when it reaches Keelor on the Blue Rodeo tour bus, en route to a show in Buffalo, New York.

With lines like “You’re not sure/If you’ll ever be/Be this high again,” for instance, the trippy “Million Miles” sounds like a hazy memory of a drug experience. The truth, however, is far more bizarre: it’s a flashback to the time when Keelor, who was given up for adoption when he was a baby, made a pilgrimage to Cape Breton in search of his birth mother. The singer was also suffering from undiagnosed diabetes, and when his blood sugar started climbing to near-coma-inducing levels, things got a little strange.

“That trip was blood-sugar ecstasy,” the silver-maned songwriter reveals. “I was hallucinating like crazy, but I just sort of took it as a natural stage of the heroic journey I was on. I just thought ‘This is perfect!’, you know. I was sort of going blind, because of the diabetes, and I was just doing this for days on end. It was an incredible trip.”

Songwriting, Keelor adds, is a useful, even therapeutic way of processing different experiences. “It’s how we distill the information,” he says. “It’s almost necessary for us to have a deeper understanding of the events in our life if we’re writing a song about it.”

The Things We Left Behind offers an interesting twist on that notion: the Keelor-penned “Venus Rising” and Cuddy’s “One Light Left in Heaven” offer two very different perspectives on the same situation. As Keelor tells it, he and his Blue Rodeo cohorts were flying in to San Francisco. With the night off, they planned on seeing friends—a married couple, who’ll remain nameless at his request—play a show at the same venue they’d headline the next day. At the airport, however, they were surprised to see the male half of the duo heading home to Toronto, with his guitar but without his wife. A rift had developed on the road, and he’d had enough.

“It was something really dramatic,” Keelor says. “But that night, she just went up there and she nailed it. There are times in a musician’s life when you’re presented with adversity, but you still have to do the show. And for some reason, because of that adversity, you just go deeper inside of yourself and you give one of the shows of your life. So she went up there and sang a couple of songs with her acoustic guitar that just broke everybody’s heart.

“My song,” he continues, “is just a little description of that evening. Jim’s is more with him, flying home that night. He sort of stays with him and does the flight home, and I’m sort of in the bar with her, afterwards, going ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ ”

He laughs, adding that the volatile pair patched things up and are still making beautiful music together. Whether they’ll have as long a run as Blue Rodeo, now celebrating its 25th year, remains to be seen, but for now, all is bliss.

Blue Rodeo plays the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts tonight and tomorrow (November 26 and 27).