As a solo artist, Broken Social Scene’s Jason Collett can be dauntingly hard to categorize. On his fourth solo release, Here’s to Being Here, there are touches of Fleetwood Mac–influenced pop rock, Rolling Stones–style grit, Dylan-esque balladeering, and Bob Marley–brand reggae. Obviously, he’s not beholden to any one particular musical genre—but he is the child of one particular decade.

“The music that’s the background to your childhood just gets under your skin,” he explains, on the line from his Toronto home. “And for me that was the ’70s, so there’s a certain sensibility of that era that, when I’m not thinking about it, is what comes out. I can’t really explain why that is—nor do I care to have to justify it.”

Collett is less testy than that statement makes him seem. His attitude to life is shot through with a kind of bemused acceptance of whatever comes his way, which serves him well as both a father of three and a working musician.

Life on the road, for instance, is celebrated on Here’s to Being Here’s loping “No Redemption Song”, which puts a stoned-sunset glow on the otherwise tedious highway that links Toronto to Montreal. And issues even closer to home come up on the dub-inflected “Charlyn, Angel of Kensington”, set in the singer-songwriter’s favourite neighbourhood.

Collett explains that his social-worker wife recently discovered that her aunt Charlyn shared the same vocation, and was instrumental in keeping Toronto’s polyglot Kensington district from being razed during the urban-renewal craze of the late 1950s and early ’60s.

“She organized a huge cleanup of the neighbourhood,” he says. “They all sort of took charge of helping each other paint their houses and fix fences and stuff like that, which prevented the city from bulldozing the area. And for that, along with her other good deeds at the time, the neighbourhood dubbed her ”˜the Angel of Kensington’. My wife brought this story home, and it just more or less leapt off the page as that song.”

Collett’s quiet sense of social justice will fit right in at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, and the songwriter himself is likely to walk away from this weekend’s festivities with fresh inspiration.

“One thing I’ve really grown to love about folk festivals is seeing the older performers,” he says. “Some of them are in their 80s and have been doing this for 50 or 60 years. That’s become my new idea of what success is—to be able to continue to be vital as an older artist.”