Released only three months after Roll With the Punches, Versatile couldn’t be any more different in its sound. This is an easy listening album, even smoother than What’s Wrong With This Picture?, with a distinct live flavour, featuring long instrumental sections and a few instrumental numbers when Van goes backstage to take a break. Drawing mainly on classics, it plays as Van’s response to Ella Fitzgerald’s American Songbook projects, although without the orchestral auteurism and architecture of Nelson Riddle as a foundation.

Instead, this is closer to the soundtrack of a Nancy Meyers film, filled with the kinds of loosely interpreted jazz standards that popped up on feel-good 90s features aimed at the Baby Boomers as they reached middle age. Among them are some truly lovely arrangements of Van’s own tracks, especially “Start All Over Again” and “I Forgot That Love Existed.” By the late 2010s these are old enough to have become classics in their own right and you wonder if Van is contemplating the fact that they are now as distant from up-and-coming singers as the works of George Gershwin and Irving Berlin were from his own coming-of-age.

Of course, there’s the requisite grouchiness here, and it’s both gentler and more pointed than on some of Van’s earlier albums of the 2010s, most clearly on a chirpy cover of “Makin’ Whoopee” that places particular emphasis on how men have been condemned to washing dishes and changing diapers. Still, the buoyancy carries the song through its more bitter moments – buoyancy is very much the aesthetic here generally, creating a sense of Van floating through the repertoire, from the surface of San Francisco Bay in a gorgeous cover of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to a surprisingly jaunty instrumental cover of “Skye Boat Song.”

And Van needs that buoyancy. By this point in the late 2010s he’s revisited certain songs so many times (both classics and his own compositions) that it’s clear what his favourites are. His albums have started to collapse the distinction between live and studio releases to become a single rotating set, with many of the same numbers recurring over and over again. It’s a novel approach for a singer-songwriter of his generation and is certainly compelling in its sheer grind and work ethic. Plus Van’s voice remains, remarkably, largely unravaged by time.