What’s more important from a legacy standpoint: being the greatest band, or being the band that writes the greatest songs?

The question is an important one when you’re reflecting on the Young Canadians’ place in Vancouver’s fabled first-wave punk gold rush.

Let enough time pass, and all forms of music eventually get classified as folk. Vancouver punk-rock legend Art Bergmann gracing the 2018 Vancouver Folk Music Festival lineup isn’t surprising at all.

As punk rock icon and Airdrie resident Art Bergmann preps for a re-release of his eponymous third album later this year, the 63-year-old songwriter has much to reflect on – especially as the release coincides with the 25th wedding anniversary of Bergmann and his wife, Sherri.

Airdrie, Alberta, is a small city of about 43,000 in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. On its outskirts lives Art Bergmann, who enjoys a spectacular view of the Rockies, and the sweeping vistas of the Prairie. Fitting real estate for an enduring outsider, who for 40 years has taken a rebel stance and held to it.

Long lauded as one of the original punk influences of the ‘70s, and an equally mark-making figure in alternative rock in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Bergmann’s current album The Apostate draws from all that and more, in crafting his best-yet collection of songs – and first full-length recording in 18 years. It says a lot about an artist’s persistence and integrity when his prime work is done at age 63; Bergmann is happy about that, as are critics, and the Polaris Music Prize large jury, who long-listed The Apostate in 2016.

Art Bergmann | May 20, 7 p.m. | Fox Cabaret | Tickets: $18 (advance), $20 (door); foxcabaret.com

There’s a morbid allure in the way Art Bergmann calls his latest album The Apostate “my epitaph.”

Twenty years after his last original studio offering, Juno-winning album What Fresh Hell Is This?, the Bergmann we find in recorded form on The Apostate is a much different animal than the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll fuelled beast that helped define Canada’s punk counterculture in the late ’70s and ’80s.

The Vancouver-born former Young Canadian is 63, has been riddled with health issues that sidelined him for more than a decade, and now lives in Airdrie, Alberta, where Bergmann contends he is battling the “dark forces of beige.”