Turning heartbreak into art is standard operating procedure for songwriters. But when it comes to specifics, a lot of lyricists just don’t want to discuss it. “It’s all there in the music,” they’ll say, or, more bluntly, “That’s none of your business.”

Christa Couture doesn’t play it coy, however. Her new disc, The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker, was largely inspired by the death of her infant son, and talking frankly about the tragedy seems as important to her healing process as writing out her pain.

“I’ve chosen to be specific about it,” she says in a telephone interview from her Vancouver home. “And so far, it’s been a really interesting experience, just in terms of what people ask about it, or how people listen to certain things.”

Couture goes on to explain how her loss has had an impact on her music—and how, in fact, it repurposed a performing career she was entirely ready to put on hold.

“When I was pregnant—and it was unplanned, and it wasn’t exactly the time I would have chosen—it was right after my last album came out,” she says, with stark clarity. “And during my pregnancy, I kind of went through a process of letting go of my music career a bit. I knew it was going to be different, obviously—I wouldn’t be on the road and in the bars until the morning, or whatever. I sort of struggled with that for a while, and by the time it came to full term, I was fully ready and okay with going in that direction. Then Emmett was born, and he died the day after he was born. It was a lot of different things that added up: a difficult labour, a forceps delivery, a bacterium in the placenta—all sorts of small things that resulted in it being hard for him.”

She sighs, and continues. “Then we were in this place where we thought we had this plan, and now we had no plan. Nothing we were expecting or working towards was happening. And obviously, the first six months left me in sort of a black hole. I remember there was a lot of serialized television in there, just numbing myself, and it took me a while to start playing again.”

But when Couture came back to music, everything had changed—and it shows. Where her debut, Fell Out of Oz, was a loose-limbed live-in-the-studio undertaking, The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker is rich and layered. As a singer, she’s using more of her voice, and as a musician she’s seeking more complex arrangements, sometimes amplifying her folk-rooted song structures with graceful strings and stirring horns. Having lost her baby, she now seems bent on bringing beauty into the world, and she doesn’t disagree with that assessment.

“I think that’s accurate,” she says. “It gave me something to do, in order to keep me somewhat sane and somewhat present in this world, but I also had all this energy that had to go somewhere. I was absolutely willing to pour myself into something, and I thought it was going to be this little boy. And I wish it had been, but that energy went into the album. I was able to really invest in it, put all my attention into it, and work on all those details.”

Couture is quick to point out that her new disc isn’t entirely a memorial for Emmett. Only three songs deal directly with his death, while the final number, “Sweetheart”, was occasioned by another passing, that of her father.

“That was also really hard, but in a different way,” she says. “I mean, I thought I knew about stuff. Like, I had cancer when I was a kid, and a lot of people that I knew died, and I had a sense that I sort of understood it. But this last year, I’ve learned a lot more.”

She suspects that she’ll be writing more songs about her dad—and about father-daughter relationships in general—for her next CD. But first there’s a cross-country tour to undertake, and although Couture is still mourning her losses, she knows that sharing her grief will prove therapeutic.

“I’d give it up if things could be different, but so what?” she says, with firm resolve. “I’m just trying to work with what I’ve got, and being able to talk about it with people and sing about it on-stage is really great for me. And I’m just so grateful that I have music—it’s such a good way to get these feelings out in a healthy fashion.”