Although raised as a Catholic, Lisa Germano abandoned the church long ago. As a result, she’s no longer convinced that something grand and beautiful awaits us on the other side, making the idea of dying scarier than it already is.

While Germano wasn’t exactly obsessed with death while writing her latest album, last year’s In the Maybe World , the inevitability of it was certainly on her mind. What would eventually shape up to be a loose concept album started with—of all things—the passing of her cat, an event which is chronicled in the gorgeously fragile lullaby “Golden Cities”.

“It was weird—my cat actually wrote that song,” Germano contends, on the line from her Los Angeles home. (It’s a testament to her charm that she can make such a statement without sounding insane.) “I would sing it to him to comfort him, but he would sort of let me know, ”˜It’s not so scary, and I’m still going to be around a lot.’ It’s like, even when you die, your spirit is still going to be around.”

The songs that spiralled out from there, initially at least, found the singer, violinist, and pianist looking at the dark side of stepping into the void. Over time, though, Germano says they became more of a celebration.

“Before the album came out, I started playing live, which I hadn’t done in two years,” she says. “I did a residency where a bunch of different musicians would play with me, which forced me to be really loose with the music. That made me have an open mind as to what the songs were about, instead of being attached to what I thought they were about.

“When I would talk about the songs at the shows,” she continues, “it wouldn’t work to say ”˜This record is going to be about death.’ That’s when I started to realize that it wasn’t about death, it was about life. The record is really about looking at situations that make you appreciate being alive.”

One of the great ­and criminally overlooked—albums of 2006, In the Maybe World would have been a top-10 mainstay if people had actually gotten the chance to hear it; released on the tiny indie label Young God, it never got the kind of exposure given the likes of Cat Power’s The Greatest or Joanna Newsom’s Ys . Chamber pop at its most ghostly and sepia-toned, the album sounds like it was recorded entirely on analogue equipment, with groaning strings, plaintive piano, and skeletal guitar often awash in tape hiss and white noise. “Red Thread” will resonate with anyone who wanted The Greatest to recapture the magic of Moon Pix ; “A Seed” reinvents the common love song for the hopelessly world-weary; and “After Monday” sug ­ests that, even when it’s pouring, everything is going to be all right.

No song better sums up the ma ­esty—and the dichotomy—of the disc than “Into Oblivion”, which features ex-Smiths guitar god Johnny Marr. Starting out as a wounded, almost eerie piano ballad, the song pulls a sudden 180 at the two-minute mark, exploding into a wide-eyed rocker designed to convince you that the world is a wondrous place.

And indeed, Germano couldn’t be happier with where she is today. After nearly two decades in the music business, both as a solo performer and as a backing musician for everyone from David Bowie to John Mellencamp to Sheryl Crow, she’s as broke as she’s ever been. But forget worrying about the darkness, Germano is too busy loving life to sweat such things.

“I’m in a good space right now, maybe because I’m not so lonely,” she says. “I’m in a relationship, and that makes a big difference. That’s going to make the next record come from, I think, a bit of a different place.”

Lisa Germano opens for Michael Brook at St. James Hall on Sunday (January 28).