The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once observed that “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” Losing oneself in any solitary pursuit, be it a quest for knowledge or for some artistic goal, can be tempting, but there’s such a thing as too much solitude.

Teen Daze’s Jamison came to that realization a couple of years ago, and this epiphany led directly to the creation of his latest full-length record, Morning World. The Abbotsford-based musician set aside his one-man home-recording modus operandi and headed down to San Francisco to record with John Vanderslice at the latter’s all-analogue studio Tiny Telephone Recording.

The resulting album retains vestiges of the classic Teen Daze sound—mostly in the warm burble of synthesizers—but songs such as “Pink” and “Infinity” are driven by electric guitars and live drums, which suggests that Morning World will get filed under “indie rock” instead of the dreaded “chillwave”.

When the Straight rings Jamison up in Scotch Creek, B.C., where he and his live band are hammering out a set for a tour that kicks off in Vancouver this weekend, he says the seed of the new record was planted while he was working on his ethereal, mostly instrumental 2013 album Glacier. At the time, he notes, he was doing a lot of listening to Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and Caribou’s Andorra.

“I remember thinking I should try to write more concise songs again,” Jamison says. “With Glacier it was way more ambient-based. And that was great, and I still love that music, but it was almost like a challenge: ‘Am I able to write a record of psychedelic pop songs?’ That’s sort of where I was initially leaning.”

And indeed, that’s the direction he headed in with his self-produced demos. He credits Vanderslice with helping him transform the material into something even more immediately accessible than the psych-pop he heard in his head.

“His ideas definitely tightened everything up,” Jamison says. “So when you listen to the home recordings, they’re much spacier—just more reverb and delay on absolutely everything. And then it was cool to come out of the session and be like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a tight indie-pop record.’ ”

This wasn’t Jamison’s first venture into that particular realm. In fact, he played in guitar-based bands in his pre–Teen Daze existence.

“Actually, it’s been funny to send this record to some friends and have them say ‘Oh, this reminds me of what you were doing in 2006 to 2007,’ ” he notes. “Like, ages ago. I’ve had some friends tell me that this is the most honest-sounding—not to say that what I was doing in the past was false by any means, but they’re like, ‘This really sounds like a Jamison record.’ ”

Part of that, he acknowledges, is that his singing is front and centre on most of these songs, especially when compared to previous Teen Daze outings, on which the vocal was used more as a textural element than as a tool to convey a message.

He definitely has something to say this time around, although he admits he has couched the words in enough metaphor to ensure that the listener won’t glean their full meaning from a surface listen. He’s singing about imaginary worlds, places he has dreamed up as mental retreats from the troubles of everyday life. His means of accessing these places, he says, has been to put on his headphones and immerse himself in the act of music-making.

“I thought that was a really interesting idea, the thought that I essentially wanted music to be this heaven, or this place that was just totally removed from all the bad things in the world that I felt like I was experiencing for the first time,” he reveals. “As I was writing the record, more and more I realized that the lyrics would always start off as very beautiful and heavenly and tranquil. And by the end of the songs everything sort of took this turn, like, ‘Nah, who are you kidding? You still have to walk out the door and deal with the problems in the world.’ ”

By the time Track 10, “Infinity”, comes around, the narrator is watching his constructed reality crumble around him. “Why can’t I stay here on this plane?” he pleads, before finally acknowledging “Now I know, this is the end.”

“These beautiful places that we create for ourselves, or these escapes that we make, are not healthy,” Jamison insists. “At the end of the day you do have to deal with what you need to deal with. It was a bit of self-therapy. I definitely feel like I came to a lot of realizations about myself in making the record. Like that realization of ‘Wow, instead of dealing with the things that I needed to deal with in relationships, I’ve just hidden in my bedroom and made records.’ I’ve put out three full-lengths—four now, including the new one—since 2010. And that’s a fraction of what I’ve made. There’s so much stuff that’s sitting on my hard drive, because, if given the space, that’s all I’ll do. I’ll just sit around and make music, and record music at home.”

Now Jamison will be spending some quality time away from his bedroom in the company of his touring bandmates. These are drummer Simon Bridgefoot (who also played on Morning World and coproduced it with Vanderslice), bassist David Wirsig, guitarist-keyboardist Kyle Reigle, and keyboardist Jordan Kurtz.

When he’s asked if these men might also accompany him to the studio for the next Teen Daze recording session, Jamison says he’s receptive to the idea. “I would actually love to have them come and play parts,” he says. “The five of us have never written together, so it would be an interesting process to see what it would be like for me to come with a very basic sort of skeleton or idea of a song and then see how the five of us flesh it out. But I really trust everyone’s taste and their playing abilities.

“It’s certainly a possibility,” he concludes. “I could foresee that to be a pretty great experience.”

Teen Daze plays Fortune Sound Club on Saturday (September 12).