Bettye LaVette thinks that Worthy, the fifth record she’s made since beginning her remarkable late-career comeback a decade ago, is simply a collection of songs that she likes to sing. This listener, however, will argue that it’s an emotionally acute concept album centred around the acquisition of wisdom, often by way of pain.

We’re probably both right.

It’s true that when the Georgia Straight reaches the soul icon, on her tour bus somewhere in the mountains near Phoenix, Arizona, she makes light of the notion that there’s any kind of big picture behind the 2015 release.

“What do you mean, ‘a big picture’?” LaVette says. “I don’t know that I’m a message singer at all. I’m not a deep singer.”

Informed that there are those who think otherwise—which she, of course, already knows—she relents, a little.

“I mean, they’re deep to me, but there isn’t any message or narrative that I’m trying to carry,” she explains. “It’s just what I felt like singing at the time. When I choose a couple of songs, if I see which way the CD is going to go, then I start to choose songs to complement those I’ve chosen. So I don’t just pick them out of the air; I try to have them have some kind of cohesiveness. And this one just turned out to be very personal, it seems—but it wasn’t by design.”

LaVette highlights the organic nature of her process by noting that she hadn’t even heard her latest record’s title tune, written by Beth Nielsen Chapman and Mary Gauthier, until the night before she was due to start work on Worthy with producer Joe Henry and his cast of handpicked musicians. Once she did, though, the whole album fell into place, from its focus to its feel—and in that light she doesn’t deny that the record is all about giving voice to hard-won experience.

“Oh, well, sure! That’s what it turned out to be. I just turned 70 in January, so almost everything I say is like that,” she says, laughing. “You know how grandmothers are. Everything I say is either a word of caution, or ‘I used to walk 25 miles to school…’ ”

LaVette clearly wears her wisdom as lightly as she carries her age. As a singer, she mixes jazzy musicality with a bluesy rasp that reflects her speaking voice; hers is a very personal approach, and one that’s well-suited to finding new depths in even the most overfamiliar tunes. For confirmation of that, just ask Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, whose “Nights in White Satin” was covered by LaVette on 2010’s Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook.

“We were just reading some wonderful things that he had written,” LaVette reveals. “He said that for him, that song was just a bunch of random thoughts that I seemed to have put together and sung correctly. When he wrote it, he said he was falling in one love and out of another; the words were just love thoughts, but they didn’t mean anything. And then he said that when he heard my rendition of it, he just broke down crying—he finally understood his song.

“To have a songwriter feel that you’d looked inside his song and took care of it and expressed some of the things that were in his heart is extremely flattering,” LaVette adds. But, really, it’s artists like Hayward, Chapman, and Gauthier who should feel honoured—writing songs that are worthy of Bettye LaVette is no small feat.

Bettye LaVette plays West Vancouver’s Kay Meek Centre on Tuesday (May 17).