Singer/songwriter Adam Baldwin was ready to give up, then he had a chat with Martha Wainwright

Adam Baldwin was ready to chuck it all.

This is tough to comprehend now that Baldwin has so obviously – nay, audibly – demonstrated that he is doing exactly what he was put on this earth to do with the rivetingly heartfelt folk-pop sleeper that is his new solo album, “Concertos & Serenades.” Such potentially fatal self-doubt is even tougher still to comprehend, however, if you’ve ever witnessed Baldwin really demonstrate how much he is exactly, exactly, exactly doing the thing he was put on this earth to do in a live setting.

Baldwin — the Nova Scotia singer/songwriter and sometime guitar-slinger for Matt Mays and El Torpedo, for the record, not the American actor who played Animal Mother in Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” — is an absolute natural onstage. He’s flat-out hilarious, for one thing, a raconteur cut from the same cloth as Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and contemporary CanCon cut-up Afie Jurvanen of Bahamas in his ability to leaven the oft-debilitatingly sad subject matter of his musical material with lighthearted, illustrative stage banter.

“Honestly, I think I do more talking than I do singing,” laughed Baldwin one recent warm evening, on a call from a ball field in Dartmouth to a ball field in Riverside Park with beers in hand on both ends. “I enjoy laying myself bare to an audience, a live audience or on record. I just find it keeps me accountable.

“My father was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and he’s a lovely man, but he doesn’t know anything about the music business and yet he always has advice about how to navigate the music business. But the one thing he did say that kinda landed and stuck and he was right was he told me ‘If people get to know you and they like you onstage, they might be a little more apt to dig into your music.’ I’ve come to understand where he might have been comin’ from. So that’s sort of what I try to do: wear it all on my sleeve. If they don’t like me as a person they’re probably not gonna like my music.”

Baldwin is currently taking the cast of desperate, down-and-out and doomed East Coast characters found on “Concertos & Serenades” on “a short little rip” to various small rooms across Canada — including the Rivoli in Toronto, where he’ll perform two shows alone with guitar and grand piano on Thursday — and is pleasantly surprised to find half of them already sold out.

This would seem to be vindication for sticking with music and shouldering the burden of recording and producing the new record himself after almost giving up during the downtime that followed 2019’s “No Rest for the Wicked.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever gone further than Ontario and just had my name on a ticket and it’s been exciting to see some places filled,” he conceded. “I had a foot-and-a-half out the door. I didn’t think I could make a go of it any longer. I’ve got two kids and my partner and we weren’t really making enough money to justify me trying to live this thing out anymore, so I was just gonna see some engagements through and kinda call it a day.

“So this album had to be my own and I was gonna live or die by it, and luckily it seems to have worked. To modest success. It took me a long time to trust myself to do this the way I want to do it and to pick and choose exactly what I want to do. I don’t need to get rich, but I wanna make a living. And right now it seems like I can do that and I’m happy doing it. I feel like I’ve won the lottery.”

Baldwin credits fellow singer/songwriter Martha Wainwright with “kinda setting me straight” in a long conversation over dinner when they chanced across each other on the same Québécois TV show and encouraging him not to give up.

After that cathartic encounter, he vowed to keep it honest and “write some songs about this part of the world” and the “unique kind of nuts” to be found in the darkest corners of the Atlantic Provinces. After that, the vivid rural character studies that would eventually make up “Concertos & Serenades” — stories of fishermen dabbling in fiery revenge and the cocaine trade, stoic miners drawing their last breaths underground in Springhill and the colourful regulars stopping by “Gerald Burgess RaceTrac Full Serve Autobody” for gas, a pack of smokes and some chit-chat — started spilling out of him.

“They just kinda fell out, Ben,” said Baldwin. “I didn’t set out to write a bunch of crazy stories about people from out east but that’s just sorta the way it turned out. I wish I could take more credit for it, but it just felt like some sort of magic that came in with the tide at exactly the right time. And I’m lucky that I was there to grab it.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever really written a song in my life. I really, really believe that they’ve all come in with the waves or the wind or something out here and I’m just lucky enough to be in the right place to catch them honestly. And there’s an art to that, I think. You have to prepare yourself for when it comes in. I don’t know that I could be, like, the kind of person who schedules a trip to Nashville and sits with some people and tries to write songs. That’s not how I operate. I just have to sit around and wait until whatever force of nature beams that stuff in.”

Baldwin has now come to the modest realization that “ultimately I can’t do anything better than this” and that playing music for a living is “the best opportunity I have to live a happy life and a fruitful life for my family.”

He’s found a way to do it that suits his gregarious, good-humoured personality, too, keeping things to an intimate scale that suits both his literate storytelling and “the silly standup routine I have to give a little bit of insight into where all of this kinda came from.”

“Like I said, I like to give a little bit of my personality in the performance and these little rooms with just me and an acoustic guitar or a piano lend themselves perfectly to it. It’s a one-sided conversation with the audience and I love it. I love playing in rock ‘n’ roll bands and having the boys around, but it is nice to have that kind of intimacy,” said Baldwin.

“I think anybody who ever parks at a bar and ends up talkin’ to a stranger, they have as much of a routine as I do. They’ve got the same stories they’re gonna tell some guy. And that’s sort of what I feel like I’m doing: ‘Pony up, I’m gonna spin you a yarn and we might become friends at the end of all this sh–.’”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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