Legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn is planning a performance at the First Parish Church in Portland Thursday evening -- a show that will be recorded for an upcoming live album.

"I think, for people coming to the show, the fact that it's being recorded is probably the only thing out of the ordinary," Cockburn said during a recent telephone interview.

"There may be one or two new songs in the show -- I don't know yet -- and I won't know until the day of whether I'm really going to do a the new songs I have or not, but it is entirely possible."

Cockburn's well over the half-way mark of his fourth decade of his illustrious career, so it really isn't surprising tours have a tendency to blur together.

"If you're doing 10 shows it's not too hard to remember which 10 they were, but if you're doing a hundred, it becomes difficult," he said with laugh.

The road trip that will bring him to Portland next week actually began with three shows in Alaska on the first of May -- again, from one side of North America to the other in one tour. And this is on top of a very busy winter.

"It was supposed to be a quiet winter for me," he said, "but I ended up saying 'Yes' to a whole bunch of benefits and also work on a film that we shot in Nepal in November and December. I do the voice-over and there's a bunch of music in it, too, so I've been busy when it was supposed to be down-time where I could collect myself and write, as an artist."

The singer-songwriter confessed he's in need of solitude to do writing nowadays and as he was unable to do it this past winter, he plays to schedule in some time to let his muse communicate, but at the same time, Cockburn's excited about this tour.

"I'm actually looking forward to (it) -- it's a short little tour, only 13 or 14 shows -- but it seemed to be a good thing to do at this moment. We've never done a solo live album before, so that'll be the direction that this will go -- the shows are going to be solo so the album will be, too, that'll be fun and add a little something to the shows."

There is a downside to the solo show that balances off all the freedom, he said, and it's something one wouldn't think about necessarily.

"It's also lonelier, so there's a trade-off -- as there is with anything, so there's the freedom we've talked about, but I miss the energy of the other people on stage, too. It works both ways for different reasons."

Lucky Clark is from Sweden, Maine.