Considering that it’s one of the sweetest and most elegant folk albums released this year, West My Friend’s Quiet Hum opens with something quite shocking: a frank, a cappella declaration that making music is not always easy.

“I don’t want to write a song today,” singer-guitarist Eden Oliver confesses, before the band kicks in and she sings “Each new word is much too tired or too clichéd.…Each new verse is like a home in disarray.”

Worse still, Oliver admits, she always has to fight an inner demon—the “No Good Monster” of the song’s title—in order to make any art at all. Lucky for us, then, that she and her bandmates have found ways to overcome that inner critic—a process that sometimes requires outside help.

“That day, when I was writing that song, I’d gone up to my roommate’s and I was like, ‘I can’t write a song!’ ” Oliver reports, on the line from West My Friend’s Victoria practice space. “And she was like, ‘Go into your room and don’t come out until a song is written!’ So that was a helpful strategy.

“I find that just immersing myself in music is also really helpful,” she continues. “After seeing shows or listening to albums, I get really excited about writing music. And I wrote a number of the songs on the album at the Banff Centre, ’cause I went to a musicians-in-residence program there last fall. It was like isolation, because I was in my own cabin-studio all day, but I was also exposed to lots of music in the evenings, ’cause there were other musicians there.”

At Banff, Oliver received helpful advice from mentor Alex Cuba, whose guitar stylings helped inspire Quiet Hum’s “Tombée”, which features lyrics en français from another artist in residence, Québécois poet Joanne Morency.

“We were sort of talking about the challenges of writing in something other than your native language,” Oliver says, “and by the next day she’d written me a poem to turn into a song.”

Most of Quiet Hum’s influences can be found closer to home, however. In many ways, West My Friend’s third album is emblematic of Vancouver Island’s burgeoning folk scene, where acts like Oliver Swain’s Big Machine, the Fretless, and the Sweet Lowdown are all making music that is simultaneously adventurous and unpretentious.

Oliver stresses that each of those bands has its own distinct identity. “With our group, it’s kind of about making whatever kind of music we want to make, regardless of the limitations of our instruments,” she says. “We look like a bluegrass-slash-zydeco band, ’cause we’ve got mandolin and accordion, but that’s not the type of music that we’re making, right? We’re just interested in pushing our instruments out to their edges.”

It probably helps that Oliver, mandolinist Alex Rempel, and accordionist Jeff Poynter all studied classical music at UVic. (Bassist Nick Mintenko is the ringer, having trained in jazz at the Victoria Conservatory.) But there’s a twist: other than Mintenko, none of them play their primary instrument in West My Friend.

“Alex is an upright bass player, and he plays with the Victoria Symphony sometimes,” Oliver explains. “I’m a classically trained flute player, and Jeff is a classically trained saxophone player. And Nick plays with [Gypsy-jazz specialist] Marc Atkinson and that kind of thing. So we all bring nontraditional perspectives to our instruments, I think.”

That carries over to Quiet Hum as a whole. While it initially plays out as a simple collection of songs, the record eventually reveals itself to be more than that. If it opens with a song of self-doubt and ambivalence in “No Good Monster”, it closes on a much more positive note, thanks to the up-with-people optimism of “How Could I Not Sing?”.

“The album has a lot of themes, including songwriting and the role of artists in society,” Oliver says, noting that Quiet Hum progresses from “I don’t want to write a song today” to “If the birds were singing, how could I not sing?”

“Regardless of whether you totally feel like it every day,” she adds, “music is something that you kind of have to do.”

West My Friend plays a CD-release party for Quiet Hum at Café Deux Soleils on Friday (June 3).