There was a time when, if you wanted to know what was going on inside Ari Picker’s head, you needed only to look at the lyrics he wrote. As the singer and main creative force behind Lost in the Trees, Picker has spent much of his career exploring a subject that is particularly dear to him: his mother. On Lost in the Trees’ 2007 EP Time Taunts Me and the following year’s full-length Alone in an Empty House, Picker detailed his mom’s tough life: Karen Shelton had weathered the deaths of premature twin daughters, single motherhood, and breast cancer. Tragically, the subject of the next Lost in the Trees album, 2012’s A Church That Fits Our Needs, was Shelton’s 2009 suicide, which she carried out after returning home from her son’s wedding.

Harrowing stuff, but Picker channelled it into baroque pop of exquisite beauty, showcasing not only his lilting tenor voice but also his skill at composing and arranging classically inspired string parts. After exploring similar sonic and thematic terrain for several years, however, he felt that it was time to move on. Reached at a Los Angeles tour stop, Picker says the most recent Lost in the Trees album, Past Life, is much less personal than his previous work.

“I was very deliberate to take myself out of it as much as possible,” the Chapel Hill–based musician notes, revealing that he spent time at the University of North Carolina’s Ackland Art Museum to kick-start his creative engine.

“I was hoping to reach out and grab the lyrics versus digging inside myself for them,” he says. “I wanted the lyric process to be more hands-on and external versus the last records being more internal. So I went to the museum and wrote poems about the different paintings—very loose poems; sometimes it would just be a springboard—then I would finish it. Sometimes the poems would be very literal. And then I did the cut-and-paste thing, where I just put it all in front of me and moved it around and looked for a story, and tried to make it a very hands-on, physical process.”

The result suggests that Picker couldn’t quite escape himself; the deeply metaphysical album’s connecting threads are love, death, and rebirth. “The way I’ve been describing it is two souls moving from one life to the next, either in tandem or together, in this very romantic, adventurous way, or them being separated by a life and them yearning for each other in some weird way,” he says of the album’s themes. “I think the mirror mentioned in some of the songs is supposed to be some sort of portal, possibly, from one life to the next, or seeing something in yourself that makes you feel something that might be from a previous life.”

The strings, incidentally, are largely absent, and the band’s chamber-pop aesthetic has been replaced by a sound that favours twinkling keyboards, downtempo beats, and, on the title track, rock guitar. Picker says the sonic shift makes for a more immediate live show—and also a louder one.

“It feels great,” he says. “It’s fun to play rock ’n’ roll, for lack of a better description. It’s a lot simpler, and easy to kind of lose yourself in, and not as academic, I guess—in a nice way. It’s definitely more visceral. We can fill the speakers a little better than we used to.”

Lost in the Trees plays the Media Club on Thursday (March 27).