CANADIAN singer-songwriter Adam Cohen will play Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, London and Pocklington Arts Centre on his five-date British tour early next year.

It is a tour that might never have happened. Three years ago, Leonard Cohen's son had decided that he and the music business should call it quits.

"I thought I'd learned my lesson on the last record. A pretty towering lesson. That whatʼs most important to me are my roots, my family, my home and ultimately 'knowing thyself'," says the Quebec musician, who will perform in Pocklington on January 31.

He was talked into giving his music-making one last go and duly delivered his 2011 album, Like A Man, a set of love songs of elegant, intimate beauty performed on a nylon-string guitar that engaged in a deep personal conversation with father Leonard, inevitably one of his greatest musical influences. The album went gold and a long world tour and great anticipation for the follow-up ensued.

In a break between concerts, Cohen went into the studio and emerged with a new album that he promptly scrapped because it "didn't feel honest".

“I realised that I needed desperate measures to keep me honest and also to relieve me of the anxiety of following up the only successful record I've ever made," he says. "However deliciously I had been in orbit, touring with that record, I needed to tap into something more terrestrial, more rooted and real," he says.

The result is We Go Home, Cohen's fifth album, a homemade set released in September from recording sessions in rooms so familiar to him from family times past.

He and his band were touring Europe at the time, whereupon Cohen decided to set up shop in the little white house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he had spent much of his childhood.

"Making an album in the comfort of home on makeshift equipment with this band of touring musicians, who had become my family, immediately offered a beacon of hope that no studio, or session players or priceless gear ever could," he says.

They continued recording in Montreal, where Adam was born, in the house where he spent his earliest years.

"I knew I was painting a target on my back, making my album in the so-called homes of Leonard Cohen, but they're my homes too. These are the walls that saw me grow up the most and that I needed to come back to. My muse is my home."

Some themes on We Go Home continue the conversation that Like A Man had begun.

"I want the songs to speak for themselves, but what I can say is that the songs on this record mostly chronicle conversations Iʼve either had with my old man, or want to have with my boy [seven-year-old son, Cassius], and a few conversations I'm having with myself," says Cohen. "And, of course, there are love songs."

The album's tone is richer and fuller this time, more diverse, making the most of the three-piece band and three-piece string section from his tour. The nylon-string guitar is still present, but there are also piano songs too, while the title track's tenderness and self-mocking humour recalls another of Cohen's influences, Randy Newman.

"My last album was about me finally claiming my belonging to a tradition and finding my voice within that tradition," says Cohen. "My new album is about me raising my voice."

Adam Cohen plays Pocklington Arts Centre on January 31 2015, 8pm. Tickets: £15 on 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk