What Diyet sees when she looks out her front door is about as far removed from the Downtown Eastside as is imaginable. “I have an amazing view,” the mono-monikered singer-songwriter reports from the Yukon, the morning after a Whitehorse show. “We’re right on big Kluane Lake, so I see the lake, and the mountains, and my garden.”

It’s majestic terrain, yet Diyet will fit right in when she plays Oppenheimer Park this weekend, as part of the 40th annual Powell Street Festival—and not only because her Japanese-Canadian ancestors lived and worked in the DTES prior to being forcibly removed during the Second World War. The topics she’s writing about on her as-yet-untitled sophomore album are just as relevant to the corner of Powell and Gore as they are to the Burwash Landing homestead she shares with husband and bandmate Robert van Lieshout—even if that’s a connection she hadn’t made until now.

“With this new record that we’re working on right now, writing-wise, I went a little bit more introspective,” Diyet says. “As I look back on some of the tunes and reflect on the lyrics—you know, ‘Do I need to change this? Do I need to work on it?’—I see that it’s really about relationships. I don’t know if I’d say it’s more personal, but it’s definitely coming from a more personal place. And that’s a little bit scary. Sometimes you go, ‘Is that a can of worms, or is that something to bring out and talk about?’

“I live in a really small village, and in the last few years we’ve suffered some big tragedies,” she continues. “And how that affects the people in such a small place is that you really have to learn to depend on each other for emotional support and emotional health—which is something that does not happen in a larger centre, where you’ve got a wider network and some anonymity.”

Although the tragedies Diyet is referring to were specific to her community, parallels can be drawn with the DTES, which is currently reeling under an onslaught of fentanyl-related overdoses. And in both cases, music can help the survivors cope with grief.

“Sometimes you feel like you have to shoulder some of those things—those tough topics and hard losses—by yourself,” Diyet says, before adding that she hopes one of her new pieces, tentatively titled “Mourning Song”, will help others share the bur­den of emotional trauma.

“I wrote it after my community had two deaths by suicide, just as something that was intended to be a healing thing for myself,” she explains. “I wanted to process some of those thoughts like ‘What happens after? What about the persons that are left behind?’

“There’s grief, you know, but there’s also an underlying layer of anger,” she adds. “People get mad—not at the person, but at the situation. Mad at the ‘why’, right? So I’m asking, ‘What about those people that are left thinking those thoughts?’ And is it okay to feel that way?”

Diyet is still puzzling over how those questions can be answered—but by asking them so bravely, she’s doing a favour for her community, and for ours.

Diyet plays the Powell Street Festival on Saturday (July 30).