It becomes obvious, as the hotel door swings open into a wall of tobacco smoke, that Burton Cummings has not held onto that famous rock 'n' roll howl all these years by cutting cigarettes out of his diet.

Or by cutting anything out of his diet, by the looks of things. Delighted that his inquisitor will join him and a managerial type in their next round of smokes – "Always good to meet another brother in the great fraternity of smokers," he crows – he settles his portly frame back behind a half-eaten burger-and-fries plate and divulges the secret health regimen that allowed a 60-year-old Burton Cummings to sound reassuringly, robustly like the Burton Cummings of yore while recording his latest album, Above the Ground.

"Good Canadian beer and good Canadian cigarettes, man," says the former Guess Who singer, who turned 61 on New Year's Eve. "Yeah, my health regimen: I eat junk food, I do all the wrong things for a singer. But I do use my voice a lot. When I'm at home, I'll pick up a guitar and sing songs or go to the piano and sing. I think your voice is like any other muscle: if you don't use it, it'll let you down. But if you use it all the time ...

"There are some singers who don't lose it, and I would like to try to be one of those for another 10 or 20 years maybe."

The voice is there, then. But Cummings realized just how long it had been since he'd provided the world with any evidence that he could still write a song when his songwriting foil of four decades, Randy Bachman, went down for a shoulder operation in November 2007 and begged off touring duties in their Bachman-Cummings nostalgia act for a few months.

Was he going to keep schlepping around, sans Bachman, doing "American Woman" and "No Sugar Tonight" every night? Or was he going to stop dithering and do something with the stacks of songs he'd accumulated since his last solo album, Plus Signs, was released in 1990?

"This window opened up, so rather than just touring and playing the old songs as Burton, I thought: `Here's my chance to make this new album I've been thinking about for a few years,'" he recalls. "And next thing I know – bang-o! – the studio was booked for Jan. 11, 2008, and the flights were booked for my band, the Carpet Frogs, to come down from Toronto to L.A. Once I heard officially that it was gonna happen, it was like a bit of weight was lifted off my shoulders."

Perhaps conscious of past mistakes made in the studio, for Above the Ground Cummings stuck to the bluesy, meat-and-potatoes rockers and wistful hippie-dippy ballads upon which his and the Guess Who's careers were built.

The Carpet Frogs, a versatile Toronto outfit that's served as Cummings' touring band for most of the 2000s, were crucial to maintaining the record's likeably straightforward, classic-rock feel, says Cummings, who wanted to avoid making a studio record that sounded "synthetic and machinistic," and go for something that sounded more organic this time around. Thus, he shot up to Toronto for a few days of prep work with the Frogs in a Brampton rehearsal studio before recording began.

"This a real band that plays live, that works live and we just took that into the studio and recorded it. The album wouldn't be what it is without the Carpet Frogs," he says. "We're very good friends. We've been working together for seven or eight years now. You can get the high-dollar, hotshot studio players to come in, and they play great and it's all good and they get their huge cheque and they leave. And the next afternoon, these guys wouldn't remember one thing about these songs that they've played on and you'll never see them again in your life. There's a detachment to it.

"I've worked that way before. When I first went solo we had all these hotshot players: Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Jeff Porcaro and Scotty Edwards on bass and Ray Parker Jr. on guitar sometimes, Jim Horner on sax. I had my choice of the cream of the crop of L.A. studio players and, don't get me wrong, those were good records. But to have my own band and take that band feeling into the studio, it sounds like a `band' record."

Curiously, after 40 years in the business and armloads of gold records, Cummings also managed to notch a personal "first" with Above the Ground: it's the only record in his career written and produced entirely by Burton Cummings and Burton Cummings alone.

"This is the first time I've ever written all the songs myself without one co-writer on anything. When I looked at the back cover and saw `All songs by Burton Cummings,' I thought: `Aaaw, isn't that nice to see?' After 33 releases, that's the first one," he says.

"I was exhausted by the end of that, but I'm proud it and I'm pleased with it. There was no interference, no intervention from anybody. There was nobody telling me, `Do this, don't do that!' or `Don't do this, do that!' So I've really made the album I wanted to make."