Neo-folk singer/songwriter Rae Spoon releases a new album this month, an honest and revealing album dealing in part with Spoon’s identity as a transgender artist. His tour story comes from a few winters ago: he had been living in East Germany but was invited to play in Whitehorse in the Yukon for a New Year’s Eve show.

“I started in Weimar, East Germany,” Spoon begins, “and went to the airport there the night before my morning flight, thinking the airport would be open all night and I could sleep there. I showed up at 10 p.m., but found out the airport was only open for another half hour. So I went up to the German police, put on my most innocent face, and asked if they thought it was safe for me to sleep outside the airport.”

Spoon, who is slight of build, laughs. “To them I must have looked really small; they let me sleep inside the airport. It’s a huge wartime, like, bunker-style airport, and I was alone with just these German police who were smoking all night.

Eventually I flew to Belgium, from Belgium to New York, then I was going to fly to from New York to Vancouver, but there was one problem in that I had screwed up and booked a flight a month later, on Jan. 26 instead of Dec. 26 — I got to the gate and found out I wasn’t on the flight. I called my sister and she bailed me out, and I got a ticket that left via Phoenix, but not until the next day. So I spent the night sleeping on the floor in JFK Airport in New York, which I actually really enjoyed, I was so tired.”

I ask Spoon how he had possibly booked a flight for the wrong month. ”If you do your own bookings long enough,” he replies, “especially when you’re burnt out, you need to treat it as if you’ve done all of it drunk, even if you didn’t. You need to double-check everything 10 times, because inevitably you paint yourself into a corner and do something really dumb.”

From Vancouver (where he again slept overnight in the airport) Spoon chose to take the two-day Greyhound bus trip to Whitehorse instead of a plane “because of who I am.” (Spoon is known for touring across Canada via Greyhound; until a few years ago he didn’t have a driver’s licence.) However, this time he had a few reservations about his famed mode of transport.

“There’s something about the trip to Whitehorse in the winter that makes you realize how not-invincible the Greyhound is. If you were to break down on that last leg you could easily freeze to death. But other than that, it was really relaxing.

“This was before the death toll on the Greyhound, of course,” he adds, referring to the recent tuberculosis incident on a Greyhound going from Toronto to Detroit. “But I’m willing to be the mascot for the Greyhound. I’m Rae Spoon and I don’t have TB. Everyone on the Greyhound is sort of cracking jokes about that these days — nervously. And of course there has been that stabbing last week, and the guy who got beheaded. I think I could really help them with some positive PR.”

After the New Year’s show Spoon and Ivan Coyote (another transgender artist) drove six more hours north to Dawson City, and then did a tour of northern B.C. — in Spoon’s white hearse. Spoon’s family operates a funeral home; when Spoon finally did get his driver’s licence, his touring vehicle was a hearse — hence the name of his sophomore album, White Hearse Comes Rolling.

On the way out of Smithers, B.C., Coyote was driving and somehow accidentally ended up at the front of a wedding procession — in the hearse. “Everyone was honking at us, thinking we were the bride and groom,” Spoon laughs. “It was kind of uncomfortable for a number of reasons.”

Suffice it to say, Spoon definitely has had his share of adventures “being who he is.” He plays The Haven Social Club on Oct. 9.