When Foy Vance walks on stage at the Usher Hall later this year, it will be during a tour marking the end of a creative journey.

“I feel like I finally walked, I finally got my degree,” he says. “They gave me the paper. But there’s no such thing as an end really. Every ending just reveals itself as a new beginning.”

It is a fitting frame for a performer whose work resists clean narrative closure. His songs are often rooted in soul-baring honesty, but rarely settle into certainty. Edinburgh is something of a stronghold for Vance. This writer has watched him perform memorable sold-out shows there that linger long in the memory. They carry emotional heft, but also humour, Vance is a storyteller who does not take himself too seriously.“I remember walking Arthur’s Street,” he says of a previous visit. “It was a gorgeous day. I do remember that day vividly.”

Place has been an essential factor in Vance’s life and work. Born in County Down, Northern Ireland, he lived in the American south as a boy while his father worked as a travelling preacher. A shift from London to Scotland proved creatively pivotal.“Moving from London to Aberfeldy was like moving from the humdrum of industry to the haunts of ancient bards,” he says.

“It hit me hard. In Aberfeldy there’s this glorious lack of human intention,” he adds. “Mountains, trees, rivers. It felt peaceful, ancient… like a homecoming.” His current album The Wake is the seventh by Vance, marking the completion of a journey that began at the end of the 1990s. It was after playing a gig on the Spanish island of Lanzarote that he learned of his father’s fatal heart attack. As an act of remembrance, he decided to write seven albums, that would be a creative exploration as much as a kind of requiem.

The number carried significant meaning: his father would often repeat a line attributed to Aristotle and St Ignatius Loyola — “Give me the boy to the age of seven, and I will give you the man.”

Songwriters often describe a sense of presence when writing, and Vance is comfortable with that idea. “I would completely say that my dad was my co-writer in all these things,” he says. “The day he died was the day I started hearing the words very, very clearly.” After his father’s death, there was clarity of purpose. “Everything lined up,” he says. “I knew I was meant to make seven records, each one representing a stage of my growth as an artist and a songwriter.”

He recalls a story about musician Billy Strings and a guitar sold in difficult circumstances, then later bought back. Instruments, he suggests, can become extensions of memories from days long gone and connections that that don’t diminish over time. “That story hit me sideways,” he says. “That’s why I’ve clung to my guitar like a life raft.”

On songwriting, he resists the idea of it as purely self-generated. “I don’t think I sit down and create this out of my own smarts,” he says. “I tune into whatever’s out there. You catch something and you ride it like a wave.” One of the central songs on The Wake, produced by Ethan Johns, is “I’m Not Celebrating”.

In the studio, some necessary subtractions were made. “There was hope in the song where there was no hope in reality,” he says. “We realised we had to remove the word ‘if’. It was too pregnant with hope.” The change might sound minor, but for Vance it was essential. “That word — ‘if’ — was the poem my dad used to recite to me,” he says, referring to Rudyard Kipling’s “If”. “So taking it out was bigger than just the song.”

The Usher Hall, with its reputation for acoustic clarity, feels a natural fit for Vance. He was recently in the city for a low-key performance at Assai Records, with fans up close. “It’s almost easier to play to a thousand people than thirty,” he says. “With thirty, you can see everyone’s face and that’s terrifying. I’m always pleasantly surprised that anyone shows up. You just rock up on the other side of the world and hope the room fills. When it does, it still feels wild.”

Beyond ownership, Vance’s songs have taken on lives beyond him — in churches, choirs and community performances. His song Guiding Light, featuring Ed Sheeran, was performed by the Christmas Choir at Bonnyrigg Parish Church in Midlothian. “If a church uses one of my songs like that, that’s a beautiful thing.”

As the conversation closes, he returns to where he began: inspiration as something unforced, it comes from a strange place. “Art would do it for free,” he says. “It just wants to sneak in, do the thing, and sneak out the back door.”

Foy Vance plays The Usher Hall on 17 October his new album The Wake is out now

PHOTO Gregg Houston

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