As unmistakably different as Good Advice is from her past works, Basia Bulat once again finds herself in a familiar place. The just-released full-length sparkles with guitar-strafed pop songs that seem from another era. One minute Bulat sounds like she’s hanging in swinging-’60s Paris with Françoise Hardy (“La La Lie”), and the next she’s hunkering down in a classic Deep South church for the gospel-tinged soul of “In the Name Of”.

Triple-fuzzed guitars—courtesy of producer Jim James (My Morning Jacket)—ebb and flow throughout, the drums and keyboards often seeming otherworldly on postpaisley numbers like “Time” and “Infamous”. It’s all a stunning departure from the wide-eyed folk of Bulat’s 2007 debut album, Oh, My Darling.

What’s stayed the same is the way the singer is happiest speaking in code. Pick through Good Advice’s lyrics (“Tell me again how much you love me/Even the days when you doubt it”) and you’ll start to think there was some considerable drama in the 31-year-old’s life after the release of 2013’s Tall Tall Shadow.

When she calls the Straight from her adopted hometown of Montreal, Bulat won’t deny that something big happened back then, but she won’t really confirm it either.

“I’m making something that is coming from me,” she cheerfully deflects. “Even if people are making work that seems really distant from who they are, there’s always going to be an element of the very personal. What I’ve realized is that everyone’s work is coming from a personal place, even if it doesn’t seem that way initially. So it’s part of the price of admission, but in a certain way I’m never going to get used to talking about myself. I’m much more comfortable making records, and just making things in general.”

Her skillful evasiveness is in some ways to be expected. Tall Tall Shadow was also born out of trauma, and the general consensus was that Bulat had lost someone close to her, something that she was at the time also hesitant to discuss in detail.

Based on Good Advice’s lyrics, an important relationship ended. Instead of making a record for drinking alone in the dark, Bulat chose to make her most sparkling, upbeat album yet.

Looking back on the process, she has nothing but positive things to say about the album’s birth. First came a fresh start in moving from Toronto to Montreal. Eventually, she loaded up the car and drove solo to James’s Kentucky studio, Stevie Nicks and Prince getting heavy play on the stereo during the trip down.

“It was good because I got to go off the beaten path,” she recalls. “I wasn’t going to L.A. or New York to record, somewhere really commercial. What happened was, really quickly, we just got down to business, and that made everyone open up.”

If there was an unstated mission, it was to do something different both from Bulat’s early folk work and from the more chamber-pop-leaning Tall Tall Shadow.

“We didn’t want to box ourselves in,” the singer says. “I sent the songs, but we didn’t really define what we’d do before I got there.”

For those wanting more from Bulat, here’s some good advice for understanding where she’s coming from: she seems to be a firm believer that it’s best to use your imagination.

“You want to use your personal experiences because that’s what you know best,” she says, “to make something that’s not just all about you. I don’t think that it would resonate with anyone if the songs were all incredibly detailed stuff about my life. The goal is to do something that speaks to something that’s a little bigger. Or, at least, you hope.”

Basia Bulat plays Fortune Sound Club on Thursday (February 25).