The Holly McNarland whose latest record, Chin Up Buttercup, was released this past June is about as far from the Holly McNarland you might remember from her hit-making days in the late '90s as can be. The woman who delivered the caustic "Mr. 5 Minutes", an ode to the shortcomings in her lover's stamina, in 1996 has just put her 11-month-old daughter, Coco Belle, down for a nap. Out in the back yard, her ex-husband, Jay Mirus, is keeping her seven-year-old son, Nege, busy while mommy talks rock. They all live together, for the moment: McNarland, her ex, their son, McNarland's current boyfriend, and their daughter–due to the unfortunate sale of McNarland's rental home some months ago. It sounds like a nightmare, but really, she couldn't sound more relaxed.

"I really dig the motherhood thing," she says, over the sound of barking dogs and laughing kids. "But it's nice to take a break from it and talk about music with you."

These days, talking about music with McNarland is almost inextricable from talking about her children. Chin Up Buttercup, the famously scrappy singer's first full-length in four years, is completely informed by her relationship with her son, spinning his childish flights of fancy into entire songs.

"I only had Nege when I made this record," McNarland says. "So a lot of it is about me getting to bond with him. This record has actually been done for a couple years. Everything was finished, and then I got pregnant [with Coco] and I had to stop for a bit."

This may have thrown a wrench in the works, but McNarland explains that she was never in a hurry to get the album done. After leaving Universal shortly after her last album, 2002's Home Is Where My Feet Are, the diminutive belter and her collaborators decided to take a laid-back approach to recording.

"I had kind of had it with the music industry," she explains. "At one point, I was like, 'I'm gonna just write kids' books!' But I have to make music. I have to. So we just took our time with this. We'd take a week here and a week there–any other time I've recorded, it's been for a month or two. But this was over a whole year."

The result is an album that feels like a broader reflection of McNarland's life than her previous efforts. One minute the singer is chronicling the breakdown of her marriage (the fuzz-riffed "Dear Pain" and the yearning "Bye Bye Boy"), the next she's capturing more gentle moments with Nege. (The tender rocker "Fly" was inspired by her son's musings about the wind.) Chin Up is far more balanced than anything she's done before, and while some fans who latched on to her scorned-woman lyrics will miss the bitterness, McNarland herself sounds much more pleased with the record than with anything else she's done. What's more, there are still plenty of hard-edged sounds and trademark vocal wails and growls on the record. She's not gone soft rock; she's just happy.

It would seem that, even though her career has taken something of a back seat to motherhood, she's managed to strike a balance between career and home life. Her strong relationship with her extended family gives her inspiration to make music, and when the time comes to perform it, that family is functional enough to allow her to get away.

"There's really nothing I would do differently," she says of her 12-year career. "I mean, financially I haven't been the smartest, and the business end of things I would have done better. But I haven't had a 'real' job in 13 years, you know. That's great. And my music allows me to stay home and be with my kids. Maybe I shouldn't have been such a pain in the ass when I was younger, but other than that, no regrets."

Holly McNarland plays the Vancouver East Cultural Centre tonight (September 6).