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Mark Holden is missing his weekly session with his personal trainer to take this walk with me. He smiles as we embark on the near hour-long circuit the 72-year-old does three times a week. Holden says “a nice little walk” is essential to “fighting the forces of gravity that try to bring you down” in your eighth decade.

It’s a brisk Melbourne morning, overcast and still as we set off from the suburban streets towards the Elwood foreshore. Holden has been a local since 1998 when he returned from decades as a music industry journeyman in the US after finding success in Australia as a baby-faced, white dinner-suited crooner known for distributing red carnations to fans on Countdown in the mid 1970s.

We pass a “groovy” waterfront cafe via busy Ormond Esplanade (he’s usually one of the “jumper outerers” but noting my hesitation, Holden suggests we use the crossing) and reach the tranquil foreshore. As joggers lumber past, Holden glosses over the details of his unusual career: teen pop heart-throb, Logie-winning actor, US Billboard-charting songwriter, talent incubator, Australian Idol judge, barrister. Holden is gracious, easygoing and has a tendency to speak of his own life story with a mixture of wrapt astonishment and inevitability, as if his many successes and incarnations were part of some kind of providence.

His musical career, Holden explains, began thanks to his older brother Craig. “I picked up the guitar because he picked up the guitar.” He watched his brother’s band play in Adelaide pubs as a teenager – “I’d be there with my silly little cap on in my school uniform. I was hooked from then on.”

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After his rise to fame on home soil, Holden took his dreams on the road. He was scheduled to launch his first US single with a live performance on CBS when his wisdom teeth had to be removed. He performed through the swelling and the pain, but the single flopped. “It was the universe telling me what I should have probably known – that my voice was not a voice that was going to sell records in America,” he says. (“That, and it was a terrible single,” he later tells me.)

“When I listen to my stuff from the 70s it’s wild. The great artists, when they were 18, 19, were fantastic. My stuff was pretty plain,” he says as we amble along.

“So I came a-crashing there and ended up on my arse with no deal, no income and having to make a decision of whether to come back to Australia.”

It was around this time that Holden met a red-convertible-driving psychiatrist at a theatre in Los Angeles who introduced him to the works of Carl Jung.

He read “every one” of his books. He hadn’t any substance abuse issues, but he decided to quit alcohol, weed, went on a health kick “and wrote down my dreams every single day”. Over time his dreams became clearer and more memorable.

It won’t be the last time Holden brings up his dreams in our conversation, but there’s a placidness to his enthusiasm for their significance, almost as if he can’t imagine anyone not giving their oneiric experiences due consideration.

One day, he says, he awoke with the chorus of his song Lady Soul complete in his mind. He quickly filled in the gaps, recorded a demo which was played for Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records. “He played it for Smokey Robinson, the Temptations cut it and suddenly, I was a songwriter.

“That song went to number four. It was a deep, deep gift from the universe, and that kept me going on that path,” he says.

“I still pay attention to my dreams. Looking back over time I can see that I’ve been able to connect to my spirit and my soul in a way that has helped me.”

As we veer off the esplanade and head for the backstreets, Holden muses on the many hats he has worn and the long winding path between. Show dates, chart successes, fellow musicians, producers, song credits and anecdotes roll off his tongue.

He penned more than 10 Billboard-charting tracks, but when rap emerged he found it “a world that I had no place in”. “I was in the R&B world because I liked writing the songs.” He produced and coordinated David Hasselhoff’s successful albums of the early 1990s (“a great time”) and worked with Milla Jovovich on her debut album.

After he and his wife welcomed their baby daughter, Holden decided it was time to head back home. “I wanted her to grow up in Australia,” he says.

He has been home for three decades. Once back he completed the law degree he had put on hold to make way for his pop star career, but then he discovered and managed Vanessa Amorosi with Jack Strong (thanks to a tip-off from Strong’s fax machine repair guy) and returned to prime time from 2003 as one of the original judges on Australian Idol. When his stint as an Idol judge came to a sudden end in 2008, Holden says he was “reverberating from the shock of that for about a year. I really enjoyed that job.”

A thyroid cancer diagnosis in 2010 threw another spanner in the works, with treatment permanently altering his singing voice. He finally pivoted to practising law. It got him out of bed in the morning.

“I was in my mid-50s by then. I was too young to retire and I knew that I needed a challenge to reaffirm myself after the shock of that.” A chance meeting with a barrister while waiting in line for an iPhone offered Holden a vision for his next chapter.

“It took me 39 years from starting uni to when I was admitted to practise as a barrister,” he says, almost surprised at the statement himself.

He took on a mentor and found himself having to learn and figure stuff out. It was mentally stimulating, he says, but he retired 13 years later, after he became “too grumpy”.

“I started telling the judges off. And that’s really totally uncool and of no service to your client. I knew it was time to go.”

That was two years ago. Since then Holden has been writing and recording new songs, remixing dormant singles from his time in the US and remastering “the few songs I can stand” from the 70s. “And there’s only, like, 10 of them for the whole decade,” he adds with a chuckle.

He talks animatedly about the process and the inspirations as we bundle along the Elwood canal, rounding back to his home. “Music is so healthy for you. You’re using your spirit and using your ability to sing; making sound, feeling the reverberations.”

His new album, Now and Then and Shirley MacLaine, brings together collaborations with his “old buddies from Compton”, including Larry Dunn from Earth Wind & Fire, as well as new friends he has made as a member of Melbourne Savage Club, one of Australia’s oldest private members’ clubs, known for its bohemian bent. With regard to its contentious gender policy, he says: “It’s unashamedly a men’s club that welcomes women [as guests]. And I think that’s a healthy thing.”

The title track Shirley MacLaine was inspired by an off-the-cuff remark made by one of the staff at the Royal Hawaiian, a Waikiki hotel he has been visiting since the days a stopover in Honolulu was mandatory en route to Los Angeles. Holden got talking to the staff member while smoking a joint in their break area.

“It’s crazy, marijuana is totally legal, but there is nowhere to smoke … I ended up chatting with the staff where they have their cigarette breaks … and this young dude used to be her road manager. The song appeared in my mind instantly – luckily I had the wisdom to sing it into my phone.”

The project has been personally invigorating, but Holden says it’s a labour of love. “Music has no financial value any more for people my age,” he says.

While he believes it’s theoretically possible to make money off streaming, it’s not a shade on the royalties he received as the “Carnation Kid”. “Those records went gold, I did eight gigs in total … I made enough money to buy my grandparents’ house in cash.” Today he says the same amount of streams would earn him around $2,000.

“For people my age, there’s really nowhere for us to be seen any more. We’re sort of invisible,” he says with a shrug. He has formed an “old man” group at Savage Club that performs once a month. “One of the gentlemen who sang with us last night is 92!”

As we get closer to where we began, Holden considers how it’s all played out. “Professionally, I’ve done exactly what I want. I really have. And in all of those years, two handfuls of things have worked out.

“As you get older you know more than ever that there are troughs and that there are waves,” he says. “You just have to have faith in life.”

• Every Little Thing by Mark Holden is out now, streaming on all platforms. The album Now and Then and Shirley MacLaine is out on 28 August.