LAURA BARRETT with Rainos “Moyo” Mutamba and Robin Hatch at Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton), Thursday (August 8), doors 7 pm. $15. eventbrite.ca.

Laura Barrett has just released her first album in 11 years, but it’s not like she hasn’t been doing anything musically in the mid-term.

After the release of her debut album, Victory Garden, in 2008, the Toronto-born singer/songwriter became a member of the Hidden Cameras, formed the beloved Weezer cover band Sheezer (who hung up their sweaters in 2015), mentored Toronto’s next wave of musicians at Girls Rock Camp and the AGO, joined with By Divine Right’s José Contreras to score indie films Porch Stories (2015) and Birdland (2018) and wrote and performed music for comedian Becky Johnson’s improvised long-form narrative serial, Wayward. She also found the time to complete her master of education and work as an occasional teacher with the Toronto District School Board.

Barrett jokes over the phone that with only eight tracks on her newest album, Who Is The Baker? (out now on Paper Bag), it’s like she’s written less than one song per year.

“I’ve been writing music the whole time, but not all of it made it,” she says. Songs were not intentionally written as material for a new record, but often as creative exercises.

“I wrote them because they needed to come out,” she says. “[Some of them] were part of a game I play with my friends where we almost competitively write music just for the sake of getting it out there. Killing your inner critic and making work.”

Album highlight Where I’m From came out of that playful process. Featuring just piano and Barrett’s tender vocals, the song beautifully addresses how the changes a city goes through become benchmarks for our own personal changes and growth. “Everything I see, reminds me of me / the person that I was, the you I used to be,” she sings in the opening bars.

“I’m confronted with nostalgia pretty much everywhere in the city because I’ve lived in so many different parts of it,” Barrett explains about her complicated relationship with Toronto. “It’s got traces of me everywhere.”

Like the open, curious nature of the album’s title, the song is more about grappling with feelings rather than coming to a conclusion. She wrote after attending the In/Future arts event that took over Ontario Place in the summer of 2016.

“[It was a response to] going to this place of my childhood and having it be reimagined as this pretty splendid and exciting set up of art installations, and at the same time feeling really disoriented by it.”

Barrett was also one of a select group of artists-in-residence at the Honest Ed’s closing party who created an installation of the store within the store. She also wrote music for the store, some of which was based on sheet music found in the Honest Ed’s offices.

Like Toronto, Barrett has seen a lot of change in the past 11 years.

“These songs were all written at different times and not specifically for an album. A few speak to specific people and others are just internal musings, but a lot of it is about power, position and place.”

Barrett tackles these big ideas with her trademark wit, which adds weight to her more pointed songs (Just The Same As Always) and levity to her more whimsical numbers (The Humble Fawn, YVR), steering the piano-driven material away from overwrought sentimentality and toward an otherworldly, imaginative place.

Long-time fans will notice the lack of kalimba, a hand-held wooden thumb piano with metal keys and an instrument synonymous with Barrett back when she was covering Weird Al and writing speculative sci-fi songs about robot ponies.

Barrett was recently reunited with the piano she learned to play on when she was eight, and which she now primarily uses for writing. The album features four pianos, whose varied sounds and characteristics she likens to duet partners. Still, her experience with the kalimba fundamentally changed the way she composes, allowing her to explore a different approach to making music.

“The kalimba remains a major part of my musical inventory and I’m very proud of the work I’ve created with it,” she says. This album, though, is about exploring the dimensions of her first instrument. “And hopefully subverting expectations around what ‘piano-based singer/songwriter’ music sounds like.”

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