KT Tunstall goes from sparkling to somber

Renowned for her dazzlingly melodic art-pop since 2005's glossy Eye to the Telescope, Scottish singer KT Tunstall took a more somber turn with this year's Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon.

Throughout this elegantly atmospheric album (coproduced by Howie Gelb in the Tucson brush), Tunstall touches on life's rich pageant at its saddest: the decay of the body, the end of romance, the finality of death. There's a neorealist candor on this spare album unheard in previous Tunstall works. Fans and critics speculated on causes for this turn, including the recent death of her father and her divorce.

Tunstall says her new lyrical path was paved long before the sorry events of 2012.

"What may surprise people listening to the record who are aware of my seismic-shift summer last year, is that the first half of the record was written before anything happened," Tunstall says. "It's brooding and questioning and internal, and ended up possessing a very weird precognitive nature. Gelb and I talked about this, that in songwriting, the subconscious mind can often be way ahead of the 'real' world, and almost tell your fortune through lyrics that at first don't seem to make much sense. I thought I was writing about small things, and within a few months, the songs were a perfect and meaningful sound track to my life completely changing."

While listeners may have assumed that the graceful despair of "Made of Glass" reflected the loss of her father, the tune was written about a friend Tunstall lost a few years ago. So, too, was the elegiac "Yellow Flower" older than suspected, a poem she'd written several years ago.

"All the songs came so easily and effortlessly," Tunstall says. "So, even though it is personally my most emotional record, it has also been the easiest and purest to make. I was totally left alone to make what I wanted, which hadn't been the approach from my old record label. (Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon is on Blue Note.)

These new songs "fell out fast," Tunstall says, and the recording - two 10-day sessions in April and November, all live to reel-to-reel - was a pleasurable experience, considering the effect of the desert on her.

"Landscape is a regular lyrical muse for me," she says. "It always acts as a leveler to human behavior and puts us all in perspective."

Other themes run through Invisible Empire // Crescent Moon, including those of life's course and the role of fate. There's "Carried," written after several years of meditation on her own mortality.

"A few months later, my father had died, and I was carrying his ashes to London on a train, and I had never intended the song to be literal for me in that way."

Even less intentional is any overt spirituality. Tunstall is not a follower of any organized religion. These songs are the story of a journey toward personal emancipation rather than a holy drama.

"A song like 'No Better Shoulder' is but the ramp at the end that allows me to fly off into the sunset," Tunstall says, considering the song's possible spiritual bent. "Then again, I don't analyze how I am communicating while I'm writing, and prefer not to get involved with analysis of it afterwards, either. It is what comes out, it's honest.

"Good music, in my opinion, transcends language. The music I love makes me feel connected to the world in ways that I wouldn't experience without it."