There's commotion in the background, and Richard Ashcroft sounds distracted.

There are, he explains over the phone, "about 40 planes with little propellers" that are giving him a hard time.

In years past, perhaps when he was struggling to deal with the international success of Bittersweet Symphony, one might have thought the former Verve frontman meant he was on a very bad trip. Today, though, he's just talking about his kids' toys.

Now more Dad Richard than Mad Richard - the moniker handed to him by the British press during his '90s heyday - Ashcroft is comfortably immersed in domestic life. And while it led to a long break leading up to his third post-Verve solo album, this year's underrated Keys to the World, the Britrock icon - opening for Coldplay tonight and tomorrow at Air Canada Centre - claims fatherhood as a source of creative inspiration rather than stagnation.

"'Settling down' - those words are from the Walt Disney book of family life," he says. " 'Cause often, it brings more chaos into your life than you can ever imagine. It brings a deeper understanding of yourself and your own failings and the failings of people around you, and also how much you can love something or someone - all those emotions."

That may explain the subject matter of Keys to the World, which takes ambitious aim at broad targets from God and religion to world politics.

Like his previous album, he says, "it's about the search for your god or your spirituality in a world that is falling apart at the seams through religious war and natural disasters and what have you. If you've got children, then I think for the first time in your life you're perhaps not as selfish and nihilistic as you were in your youth. So you have to then start thinking not only about yourself, but mankind."

Such sweeping goals have earned considerable derision from the British press, reviving old accusations of a messiah complex. It doesn't help that Ashcroft was recently quoted in the NME comparing himself to Jesus - a quote he insists was taken out of context. But in conversation, his newfound mellowness seems to have brought a bit of perspective - and even the occasional ability to poke fun at himself.

"It's good to be able to communicate with the three fans I've got [in North America]," he says cheerily at the start of our chat. Later, he dismisses being reduced in North America from headliner to opening act. "It's a good way of me playing every night to 15,000 people, 20,000 people and saying 'hello, this is me,' " he says of touring with Coldplay. "I could spend the next four or five months touring those places and get to half the amount of people."

As for Britain's notoriously invasive press, he's learned to laugh that off as well.

"A very funny one was when my stepfather was phoned and the guy said 'Is Richard there?' and he said 'No, he's not here, and I'm making dinner at the moment, so I can't talk,' " he recalls. "The paper printed that I answered the phone and said that I can't talk now - I'm doing the housework. A week later, a Sunday supplement had a big cartoon of me hoovering - all from someone else answering the phone and saying he was making dinner. So you realize just to let it go."

If there's one topic that gets his blood rising ever so slightly, it's the suggestion that he's incapable of matching his former band's heights on his own.

"Up until the last two months, it was my first solo album," he says of Urban Hymns, the Verve's final and most commercially successful album. "Which makes people saying 'lost his Verve' kind of funny to me. 'Cause the others aren't going to come out and say 'hold on a second, I think you're being a bit harsh to old Dickie here, because we know for a fact he wrote the whole lot of it.'

"When I played [Verve guitarist Nick McCabe] the songs, he said 'just release it yourself.' And then a year or two later I'm being told that the next batch of songs that I've written, I've suddenly lost that much of my ability. It's bollocks, and I knew it then."

Then he turns philosophical again. "It's all about branding, so I lost five or six million people along the way," he says of releasing albums under his own name. "Such is life ... I'm very happy now to be a solo artist."

As for Bittersweet Symphony, which he's been known to deliver a 25-minute version of at his shows, Ashcroft holds no bitterness toward its dominance over the rest of his catalogue. Instead, he says, it sets the bar high.

"I'm looking forward to the day when a Richard Ashcroft song has the same effect," he says, the trademark self-confidence returning. "And that day will come."