According to the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, a chaotic neutral is “an individualist who follows his or her own heart, and generally shirks rules and traditions, promoting the ideal of freedom”. For Matt Good, it’s simply a way to describe his latest record.

“I went with that title because the album is kind of all over the place. It’s a little schizophrenic in that sense,” says Good, interviewed by the Straight while sipping tea at Warehouse Studio in Gastown. “I came up with the title long before I wrote anything. It just sounds cool.”

Chaotic Neutral, Good’s seventh solo studio album, was recorded with the help of long-time producer Warren Livesey. While Good was responsible for all of the writing, he diverted from his habit of hovering at the soundboard and left everything up to Livesey.

“I actually mentally did it. I laid on the damn couch and played fucking solitaire. I let him do his thing, and it turned out fantastically,” Good says, laughing. “I just kind of chilled out and left it in his hands, which is funny considering we’ve been working together for 20 years.”

In conjunction with the album title’s reference to Dungeons & Dragons, Good, a man who has no problem identifying as a geek, has created hand-drawn maps for fans who play the game. They’re currently on his website.

“I’m huge into cartography and the mapping thing—it drives my wife nuts,” notes Good. “I kind of did it for fun, because it has this connection to the record title. I’m going to release it for gaming purposes. It’s cool. Or it might be totally geeky; I don’t care.”

If that’s not enough, he’s running the Chaotic Neutral Tour Challenge, a contest in which fans are asked to photograph themselves in a specific location based on a “castle” coordinate in their town. Prizes include everything from VIP album packages to D&D starter kits.

One would assume that the album art might reflect all this talk of maps and games, but in keeping with shirking rules and traditions, Good went in a different direction. Instead, Chaotic Neutral’s cover alludes to the inspiration for the album’s first single, the melancholy, guitar-driven “All You Sons and Daughters”.

“My wife was going through some photographs and there happened to be one at the beach on a really crappy day. I saw the photo of my son and I said, ‘Stop. That’s the cover,’ ” says Good of the image, which depicts his son covered in dirt while digging for crabs in the rain.

In the single, Good stacks his children’s take on life against his own jaded approach, singing “All you sons and daughters gotta hide yourselves away/Before they burn it out of you, hide yourselves away.”

“You look at your kids and they’re innocent, and you realize that you’ve pretty much been stripped of any semblance of innocence,” Good says. “I came at it with this perspective that it’s sort of better to hide that than let anyone see.”

“All You Sons and Daughters” opens the record and fits well in Good’s “schizophrenic” set of 11 tracks. The driving hooks and heavy drum fills in “Harridan” and “Army of Lions” make for hauntingly dark epics, while the sparser “Tiger by the Tail” and “Cloudbusting” (a duet with Holly McNarland) are downtempo ballads that highlight Good’s lyrical content.

“Moment”, a reflection on the effects of living with a mental-health issue, opens with an acoustic guitar and subdued vocals, but builds to an uplifting chorus. It’s a topic Good, who suffers from bipolar dysphoric mania, is all too familiar with.

“We live in a day and age where mental illness is bantered about and you can go to your GP and he’ll throw you an antidepressant like it’s nothing. That’s the scary reality: everyone is 16, everyone listens to the Smiths, and everyone is depressed,” says Good. “But there are some people, like myself, that have issues with their neurochemistry. That can’t be fixed with fucking hot yoga. You wouldn’t tell a schizophrenic, ‘Hey man, you should really try this jasmine tea.’ You’re talking about the most powerful organ in the body.”

Still, the lyrics in “Moment” reflect a side of Good that he’d rather not show in an interview. With a purposely hard-to-detect ring of hope, he sings, “There’s gotta be a moment/When you’re gonna get it right/And the trouble up your spine/Yeah, you’re gonna let it go.”

Two decades in the music industry is a feat in Good’s eyes, as he shakes his head when the Straight asks if he imagined he’d be making records at 44. Shedding his bandmates in 2002 to escape “the constant loop of rock singles” was the only option that made sense to him, and he hasn’t looked back since.

“I knew that as time progressed, the records that I made would definitely skim off the casual listener,” Good reflects. “They would kind of go the way of the wind, and people who would actually like what I did would stay. That process, all the way up to this record, still continues. Yes, the percentage of people continues to get smaller, but it’s still significant enough that I’m able to do this as a profession. For that, I’m grateful.”

Matthew Good plays the Vogue Theatre on Friday and Saturday (November 13 and 14).