Veda Hille covers David Bowie’s “Teenage Wildlife” on her new album, Love Waves, but today is a day for preteen wildlife. There’s banging overhead, and a few minutes later a tousled head appears: Hille’s seven-year-old son, Anders, has finished helping his grandfather fix the roof and wants to show us his new drawings. West Coast ovoids mix with friendly monster faces and beaver tails; clearly, his mom is not the only talented member of the Hille clan.

We’re sitting inside the family cabin, until recently an off-the-grid shack set among second-growth firs on a moderately populous Gulf Island. Hille’s own mother stretches out on the deck with a book; beyond her is the blue-green ocean. A small ferry chugs past. Gulls call. Other islands—flat and grey, green and vertical—speckle the horizon.

It’s an idyllic scene—and, unlike the record we’re here to discuss, there’s little trouble lurking beneath its surface. The idea that Love Waves is an album about uncertainty is one that Hille at first dismisses, however—although she concedes that its final track, an inspired ecological parable based on an old folk song about a doomed ocean liner, sends listeners off on an unsettled note.

“ ‘And then we drown, clinging to one another,’ ” she says, summarizing the message of Titanic. “So, yes, there’s some of that. But a lot of the album is about the incredible fierce love that I have for my son. I hate to be a snooty parent, but it’s an unbelievable feeling that I hadn’t had access to before. And in a lot of ways it is the romantic love we’re told to look for with a partner, but I actually think that’s false. I think the real falling in love happens with your child.”

Anders is all over Love Waves: not only has Hille written songs about that all-consuming love, she’s mined his everyday utterances for lyrical inspiration. “Burst”, for instance, is a deeply tender song about watching your offspring grow up, complete with birthday parties and “fireworkers”. And even when he’s not directly present, he’s a subtle influence, as in Hille’s version of that aforementioned Bowie tune.

Hille doesn’t take credit for predicting the prettiest star’s untimely death; she started working on “Teenage Wildlife”, and Love Waves, in 2013, well before rumours about Bowie’s health had begun to percolate through the music business. At the time, she was in Berlin on a writing residency and thinking about the three formative albums—Low, Heroes, and Lodger—that Bowie had made in that same city.

“For about two weeks I went into the studio every day—just a little room with a piano, in Neukölln—and napped,” Hille says with a laugh. “Which is a crucial part of my process.”

To further prime the pump for her own new songs, she also began to work up versions of other people’s tunes, and “Teenage Wildlife”—along with Brian Eno’s “By This River” and a “rap brag” take on W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s “The Sun Whose Rays”—was among those she tried out.

“It’s a great song but not one of my favourites,” she admits. “It’s not one I’ve thought about a lot, and at first I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it.…But I really started thinking about how devastated I was going to be when Bowie died, and so at first I was making it a pure obituary for Bowie. And then I felt it was too dark, so I had to pull back.”

Eventually, she found her own reflection in Bowie’s lyrics. It’s now at least as much about the deeply ambivalent position of being a middle-aged mother in the music industry as it is about being an exploited rock star—and perhaps that’s where the uncertainty that underlies Love Waves comes in. At first, Hille admits, she didn’t know that she had anything left to say in the pop format, now that she had successfully established a parallel career as a composer for theatrical works like Onegin, her recent collaboration with playwright Amiel Gladstone.

In Berlin, she explains, “Initially, I wrote nothing. And then after two weeks I just wrote like a motherfucker, and I was thrilled. The writing was a process of ‘Do I still have a voice? Oh, yes, I still have a voice. Does the world care about this voice? “Who cares? This is my voice.” ’

“And, for me, the songs are about love,” she adds, “but also about aging, looking at where I am in the world.”

Today, on this rocky point at the edge of the Salish Sea, Hille is unquestionably in a good place—and with a strong new album to tour, the immediate future is also assured.

Veda Hille plays a launch party for Love Waves at the York Theatre on Saturday (May 28).