It's been seven years since actress Minnie Driver last released an album and she had a good reason for the delay: She became a mom. "[Motherhood] is good for writing, but it's not good for touring and putting a record out. I've got like four other records ready to go."

When it finally came time to start thinking of getting back into the studio, she decided on tackling songs she obsessed over throughout her life. In doing so, she takes material from Elliott Smith, the Killers, the Cure, Frank Sinatra, Neil Young, John Prine and Stevie Wonder and mixes country-folk, piano pop and jazzy twists on the originals for her third studio album, "Ask Me to Dance," which is streaming exclusively on Speakeasy below.

The 10-song set was recorded over roughly a two-week time frame in February 2013, with Driver working with Jim Scott (Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones, Dixie Chicks) and Marc Dauer, whom she worked with on her previous two albums.

Leading up to the recording process, Driver says she was conscious about the songs she chose and didn't want something to come off like a karaoke version. "I didn't want to make an empty record," she says.

Stand-out tracks include her take on Elliott Smith's "Waltz #2," whom she met on the set of "Good Will Hunting," Neil Young's "Tell Me Why" and the Cure's "Close to Me," the latter inspired by her days as a teenager attending awkward school dances. "I was so tall, nobody would literally ask me to dance," she says. "I didn't slow dance until I was about 17 years old."