Unlike some of her peers—Leonard Cohen comes to mind, no matter what he might claim in “Tower of Song”—Sarah McLachlan truly was born with a golden voice. Nature, unfortunately, neglected to give her a corresponding facility for the written word. A running theme in the interviews she’s given over the years has been her tendency to agonize over the writing of lyrics; sometimes, she’s said in the past, a song will take her months or even years before she feels it’s ready to see the light of day.

With her new and long-awaited Laws of Illusion, however, she’s found an effective solution: farm her lyrical duties out to a second party.

But it’s not like she’s doing the Nashville-cowrite thing, bringing in strangers to get the job done. When it came time to make the record, she discovered—much to her delight—that her long-time producer Pierre Marchand has the ability to read more than just her musical mind.

“It was so annoying!” she says, sounding anything but perturbed. Laughing down the line from an undisclosed West Coast island, where she’s on the beach with daughter Taja, she reveals that the Laws of Illusion sessions went unexpectedly quickly, thanks in part to her creative synergy with her francophone writing partner.

“We started working on this record on March 1,” she reveals. “I used to take two years to make a record, and that’s because Pierre lives in Montreal, I live in Vancouver, we both have two kids respectively, and there’s a lot going on in our lives besides the making of music. But I, over the past year, just had a flood of material. I had a lot of stuff going into the studio. Whereas usually I’d have one or two songs, I had seven or eight songs that were partially finished, and the ones that weren’t finished, I at least had the music and the form for.

“This time around,” she continues, “I’d hand a song to Pierre and say, ”˜Can you write some lyrics for this? Here’s what I’m trying to get at; here’s where I’ve got it to this far. What do you think?’ And he’d go away for three hours and come back with the song finished, and it would be perfect, whereas I would have been struggling for weeks, trying to find a focus. And this is my weakness: I am terribly unfocused, especially with two kids. I’m a really distracted individual—and lyrics, for me, are the hardest thing.”

With just over a week to go before the return of her Lilith Fair tour, which kicks off in West Vancouver on Canada Day, McLachlan sounds anything but scattered—even if she does take time out during our brief encounter to change Taja’s diaper. (We’ll spare you the details.) In fact, she sounds full of confidence and optimism—a far cry from the audibly heartbroken individual who last spoke to the Straight in February 2009.

Then, she was still reeling over her separation from husband and now-former drummer Ash Sood. Some residual sorrow remains in her voice, but it seems that time and music—especially the writing of Laws of Illusion—have worked their healing magic.

The temptation is to read the new disc as McLachlan’s divorce journal, and the singer admits that interpretation wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“A lot of it is,” she says. “But not all of it. And two of my best friends have been going through the same sort of thing in the last couple of years. It seems to be of epidemic proportion, yet incredibly pedestrian.”

What’s certain is that this always devastating experience has, ultimately, worked to McLachlan’s advantage. Even on her early demos she displayed the ability to connect with her listeners on a profound level, and now that she’s dealing with something we’ve all experienced—heartbreak, if not an actual divorce—she’ll be renewing that connection in a big way. It helps, too, that Laws of Illusion, which conceals a steely core beneath the usual lush sonics, is unquestionably her best record since her 1993 breakthrough, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.

McLachlan claims to avoid overanalyzing her own work, but she seems quite aware that part of her appeal is her ability to provide the listener with just enough room that they can plug their own experiences into her songs.

“That, perhaps, has to do with my own internal self-editing thing, where I want to reveal quite a bit, but I’m cognizant of not revealing too much,” she muses. “I want it to be vague, because I do want to have other people be able to interpret it so it appeals to them. But, again, that’s not a specific thing that I go for. It’s just how it ends up, because I don’t want to be too specific.

“And it’s one thing when I’m talking about my own feelings,” she adds. “But with this album, I’m obviously bringing other people into it, and that’s a very intimate place that anybody else isn’t necessarily going to want to be brought into. You know what I’m saying?

“There’s other parties involved, basically, that I’m cognizant of not hurting. And I’m aware that it’s not their desire to have our relationship played out in a public forum—and yet here I am with a record that’s quite obviously a lot to do with that. And my disclaimer to that is, there’s always a lot of creative licence.”

Fair enough. And with Laws of Illusion ending a seven-year run of live albums, rarities collections, Christmas records, and greatest-hits packages, many will be glad McLachlan’s back, with that licence renewed.

Sarah McLachlan headlines Lilith Fair at West Vancouver’s Ambleside Park on Canada Day (July 1).