Ask an artist to discuss their favourite creation and it is an invitation for a plug of their recent output. Justin Currie, however, is a man who loathes platitudes. He stares life down the barrel.

The first thing he says when he picks up the phone to chat about his latest record, Lower Reaches, confirms as much.

“I don’t really do cheery – and when I do, people usually fall off their chairs.”

As a solo artist, the Del Amitri frontman writes gravelly, mostly minor key songs. The subject matter is introspective, dark and fastidiously executed. The bright and uptempo chart-friendly production of the Del Amitri days is gone.

He says Half Of Me is about getting older but not growing up. It recollects his nights out at Glasgow’s Nice ’N’ Sleazy, where he’ll be surrounded by 25-year-olds knocking back Jaegerbombs and moshing to The Cramps.

“I see it as about the extended adolescence, the schizophrenia of reaching one’s half century, and half of you still wanting to be and to do the things you did in your 20s, while the other half is thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

He’s spent a lifetime trying to escape the bonds of domesticity, which he calls “that ghastly domestic routine of cleaning the same tea cups and making the same food once a week; it is so stultifying”.

He has no children, which must help. He never wanted children because he remembers his musician dad was away so frequently. And despite the touring schedule slowing since Del Amitri went on hiatus in 2002 (though they have just announced a 2014 tour) and a long-term girlfriend, offspring is not an ambition.

“Certainly if you are a musician you are encouraged to pursue that adolescent fantasy in a way – it seems legitimate to run away and join the circus, even at the age of 70. Yet you are aware this is something your parents wouldn’t have done, so it becomes confusing.”

Manufactured loneliness

He’s still following the fantasy – and ran away to the Hebridean island of Skye for an intense writing period for Lower Reaches.

He wanted to go back to a world without mobile phones and internet, so rented a remote cottage beneath The Cullins mountains. He allowed himself only snippets of TV and radio. He listened to music in the evenings and wrote all day.

“You have to manufacture your own loneliness as a writer. It is not a collaborative thing.”

Currie returned to Glasgow the happiest he’d ever been. He’d written 15 songs in 11 days. With Del Amitri, four songs in a week had been his personal best.

“I just got very lucky. I’m eternally grateful it worked otherwise it would have just been a walking holiday – and I think I only did two walks the whole time I was there.”

After self-producing his other solo records, Currie wanted some outside help for Lower Reaches.

He picked Mike McCarthy, who had worked on The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn’s debut solo record and had an army of jobbing Austin musicians to call on.

“He had booked musicians before we went over. We spent six days re-routing the songs, chopping bits out, and I actually really enjoyed that bit.”

The first of three solo albums, What Is Love For, arrived in 2007, before 2010’s The Great War and now Lower Reaches, which was released on Currie’s own Endless Shipwreck label in August.

“I like the way I approached this new one and the fact somebody else produced it. That works for me. The key thing when you make records is you have to believe the current record is better than the last one. I certainly believe that. Over the course of one’s life you change your mind all the time on what your best record is.”

He compares records to lovers.

“They are a bit like sexual partners: you always end up preferring the one before last.”

For The Great War, he added a few more radio-friendly pop songs because he “felt sorry” for his New York label Rykodisc (owned by Warner Records) after giving them the despondent collection, What Is Love For.

“What Is Love For was so miserable they couldn’t have got it anywhere near radio,” he jokes.

As regards its follow-up, he now realises, “I don’t think I should be doing pop at my age. Having said that, if one of the songs from The Great War had walked on to the radio, I would have considered it a success.”

Twelve minor key ballads held back from The Great War almost made Lower Reaches a live piano vocal record. But, after hearing Mid Air by Paul Buchanan (formerly of Deacon Blue), Currie realised he was never going to do it better and changed his mind.

Instead he has set out to right the wrongs from The Great War.

“There is always a point when you listen to the last one and you know what is wrong and you admit you didn’t really get it right and that is impetus to make another one.”