I am crossing Burrard Street, on foot, heading west on Robson. This is where the sidewalk narrows and becomes rich with visitors. People rush forward, in profile, looking for bargains. Nobody looks where they’re going.

In the distance: the dance of the street musician, the slow teetering circle that is “site assessment.” Having busked, I know what she’s thinking. Is the sidewalk wide enough? Are the “acoustics” okay? If this is such a good spot, why isn’t somebody here already?

Yesterday’s busker was a Karl Marx look-alike dressed in purple coveralls and equipped with a button accordion; the day before, it was a clean-cut mom and her chorus of daughters.

Today – like every day in the ever-changing city of Vancouver (a city which, in the mid-1980s, quit history to play scratch-and-win with the future) – it is someone new. Not just a busker but her influences too: Avril’s makeup, Exene’s shoes, an undershirt like the one Patti Smith used to wear.

Before Expo 86, no one busked on Robson. Before Expo, Robson was mostly mom-and-pop: hardware stores, linen shops, inexpensive restaurants. It was strict, frugal, a site of propriety. (These were the days when resources, not services, fuelled the local economy.)

Then the chains came. As if overnight, what was once a street guarded by broom-wielding proprietors was suddenly free as a beach. The absence of local ownership can allow for stuff like busking, which is partly why Robson blossomed into what Granville Street was supposed to become in the mid-1970s, when they banned cars and made it a mall. Intolerance replaced by indifference.

The busker is halfway through her first song (“a work in progress”). She is good. Really good. Although her guitar work is stiff (you can tell she learned on an electric), her voice is big, strong and fluid. As for her visual references, they are not so much in the song but behind it, driving it: Avril’s petulance, Exene’s yearning, Patti Smith’s urgency.

But more than that, it is the music of Sarah McLachlan I hear. Sarah McLachlan, who also came here after Expo, who wrote some of her first songs here and whose anthems helped define this city’s fragile laid-back vibe.