Jason Mraz has been in Tokyo for two hours. As with each city he visits, there are two things on his mind: finding fresh local produce to eat and going surfing. In Japan's capital he's confident about the former but pessimistic about the latter. Being a glass half-full kind of person, the singer-songwriter will be happy with eating well.

"It's more preparation than cooking - you're just buying fresh local produce to put together for a big old healthy protein salad," he explains. "On days off I'm a little bit more creative, add some nut cheeses and make enchiladas with nuts and beans. I'm happy that I'm shopping locally in all these communities instead of relying on pre-packaged food that's been shipped across the country in a truck."

Mraz, who tours Australia on the back of comeback single I'm Yours and his third album, We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things, has had his recent touring audited by non-profit environmental group Reverb to reduce his carbon output and encourage fans to take similar action. In the US his tour bus was fuelled with biodiesel to offset carbon dioxide emissions and the touring party used reusable water bottles.

"Obviously we're flying at this point, instead of being in a bus, but we learnt a lot about how to have less environmental impact and offset the energy that we use," Mraz says. "It was a great opportunity. Once you get into the flow of it, it feels really good and you start saving money."

The 31-year-old knows that Australia will be a better destination for surfing. A previous tour introduced him to Margaret River in Western Australia, although he's just as keen to explore Sydney's beaches. Surfing began as a pastime, a way to relax, but for Mraz it's become something more. When he took a year off after he concluded promotion of his second album, Mr. A-Z, surfing was his emotional salve.

"I had tried it many times before my break, if I had a weekend off, but I knew that to get better at it I needed daily dedication," he says. "In my year off I spent every day out there and it completely changed my life. What you have to do is apply that to everything else in your life. You can learn how to live smart and navigate life in exactly the same way as if you were going to drop in on a wave."

That progression is evident on We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. It's a relaxed, intimate journal, influenced by '70s pop, whereas Mraz's earlier compositions tied hip-hop's frenetic wordplay to breezy acoustic guitar grooves. It is calmly inquisitive where Mr. A-Z was tense and uncertain.

"That's indicative of when the two were written," Mraz says. "The second album was written in airports and buses and hotels. I was very much involved with the music industry while writing the record. There were deadlines and compromises left and right. On the new album I wrote the whole thing at home and I had no involvement with the music industry whatsoever. The songs came in an honest way and they were real."

Mraz, born and raised on the American east coast, is a west coast transplant, living in San Diego. Before he began his latest album he pledged to himself that if he couldn't come up with "something real", then he would go back to playing the coffee shops of his hometown. The most surprising outcome from his pledge is the melancholic epic Love For a Child, which details his parent's divorce.

"The story of my family kept coming up in my head and I tried to ignore it, telling myself that no one wanted to hear that, because it wasn't a love song and it wasn't a funny song," he says. "I decided to put the words down anyway, just as a working guide, but they proved to be incisive."

Contemporary life is not completely absent, however. Before cutting the album in London, Mraz badly cut his foot at home in San Diego. The hospital had a problem with his insurance details, so while he was away a computer program repeatedly called his home phone and left a message demanding payment. When he heard the answering machine tape he knew just what to do with it.

"I thought it was brilliant to hear this robot say my name and demand money," Mraz laughs. "It was a very appropriate sample to start a song called If It Kills Me."