Off the deep end, lightly

Forget the cliché about recording artists who find inspiration after downing a bottle of Jim Beam and driving their Harley out the second-story window of a Beverly Hills mansion into the oversized swimming pool below.

Laura Veirs uses a lot of oceanic imagery, but she keeps her head above water.

Because singer/songwriter Laura Veirs isn’t having it.

“I’m disciplined with my writing when I’m home from touring,” she tells Xpress. “I set a deadline for myself every year-and-a-half to make a record. No one else tells me to do it—I just feel compelled to write.”

Right on schedule, Portland-based Veirs just released Saltbreakers (Nonesuch, 2007), her pop-savvy, instrumentally lush sixth disc that shares its name with her band.

“I’ve been pretty prolific over the years without having a big drama in my life,” she reveals. “I tend to have a pretty stable existence.”

However, the impetus for Saltbreakers is classic heart-on-sleeve stuff. Still rife with the watery images for which Veirs is known, the CD—it opens with the lyric “Sorry I was cruel, I was protecting myself, drifting along with my swords out flying, tattering my own sails and I tattered yours, too”—delves into the recent end of a relationship.

Pop life

“It’s breakup and get together,” the bespectacled musician confirms. The ‘get together’ part of her album is more than a nod to her relationship with long-term collaborator and producer-turned-current-boyfriend Tucker Martine. “There’s everything in that record as far as the emotional spectrum. It’s got a full palate of emotional experience.”

The breakup album is hardly a new exemplar. There was Beck’s surprising Sea Change, Neil Halstead’s vintage-flavored Sleeping on Roads and Nick Lachey’s forgettable What’s Left of Me. But, unlike her male counterparts, Veirs doesn’t wallow in self-pity or wax despondent. Instead, she turns to oceanic metaphor: “A handful of dreamdust for my pirate, he can hear the Pacific singing.” Without the breakup/get-together back story, this is a CD in league with Sparklehorse’s ethereal strains and Mazzy Star’s dreamy pop.

“It has such negative connotations in certain circles, like, ‘That’s light, that’s meaningless.’” But she points to The Beatles as an example of what pop stars can be: “universally known” for “intelligent songwriting.” She asserts that the music world needs more artists pushing themselves to write songs of substance that simultaneously offer catchy hooks.

“The thing I like about [Saltbreakers],” she offers, “is that I didn’t try to make it sound poppy, but there are hooks on it that I think are ear-catching to the average person, and then there are lyrics in there that are unusual and kind of weird.”

Not that it’s a formula, exactly. Veirs has professed in interviews that she didn’t really get into music until college, blaming a lack of all-ages clubs in her hometown of Colorado Springs for her ambivalence to the teenage refrain: “So, what bands do you like?” And so today she approaches album crafting with a correctitude usually reserved for beakers and petri dishes.

“I don’t think, like the youngsters of the day, about singles, and just one or two songs being good,” she stresses, more schoolmarm than rock star. “I try to make each song really strong. I try to make sure each song has its own character and its own voice and its own strength.”

Recently, Veirs told 4Music that she’s noticed a pattern with other musicians as they enter their 30s. “They’ve gone to the roots of American music and the craft of songwriting.” Which is where the studious approach comes in.

“I don’t think of it so much as a job as a craft,” Veirs explains. She likens songwriting to woodworking—something that practice makes perfect. “People who keep at it tend to want to push themselves and grow. I feel challenged. I want to keep going.”

Laura Veirs and The Saltbreakers play The Grey Eagle (185 Clingman Ave.) on Sunday, May 20. Lake opens the 8 p.m. show. $10/$12. 232-5800.