Pop in The Deep End - Christine Ohlman's sixth record in more than twice as many years (when it drops on Apr. 6) - and you'll hear a collection of songs which encapsulate the many faces of love.

"Girl Growing Up" is possibly the most explicit tune about what Ohlman refers to in our interview as "love and the courage to fall into it." In the refrain, Ohlman sings, "Love is sweet and love is kind / love can help your heart unwind" but then the lyric turns toward the blues in Ohlman's voice, as she closes the couplet with "love will make a fool of you." It's not so much warning as honest admission - or perhaps understanding - of love's varied means and ends. In fact, the blues isn't always about being sad, but simply allowing room for the myriad reaches and complexities of emotion.

Speaking of love's ends, though, that tune is followed by The Deep End's most explicit song about the loss of Ohlman's husband and producer Doc Cavalier. The song is heartbreaking, sure, but eschews melodramatic sadness in favor of the more irreplaceable, mundane things one misses when facing the loss of love. "I miss the ...coming home every night of the week of you," she sings. If you manage to miss the meaning there, you start to catch on later in the disc, when she wails again and again against the lyrics to "Everybody's Got a Heartache."

The record, like any good bit of love, has layers, in other words. Ohlman was kind enough to discuss that and more in a recent phone interview. Here's the transcript:

Kim Ruehl: Let’s start with your new album The Deep End. It’s the first album in five or six years. What brought you back into the studio? Was it just time?
Christine Ohlman: Oh no. My husband passed away, who was my producer. My lead guitarist passed away [too], and there was a time when I had to reorganize my professional life. That took awhile. My husband was very sick, so that took a while too. Then I just decided it was time. I started writing. I was playing out the whole time, but I hadn’t released anything. There were some legal issues and I had to stay out of trying to release anything. Then everything got cleared up and I began to work very quickly after that. We began recording in 2008 and we finished in 2009. Everything went really smoothly. I had a lot of friends who helped me. There are a lot of guests on the record, who are all friends of mine. In the meantime, we put out a career retrospective in November 2008 called Re-Hive named after my beehive hairdo. That was the first thing I put out when I reemerged, and then this would be the first CD of new material.

KR: Have some of these songs been around for several years?
CO: Yes, exactly.

KR: Are you the kind of writer who writes toward an album, i.e. “Now I’m going to write a group of songs about …”?
CO: No, it’s interesting. Rosanne Cash, who I know from New York City, I mentioned her in the writeup because she asked me if I’d written a lot of songs about loss. There’s one song on the record, “The Gone of You,” which is about loss. But the rest of the record…it may have a bittersweet tone to it, but it’s really an album about love, the courage to fall into love. I’ve never written a thematic record. I know some friends who sit down and write a specific body of songs, but I don’t normally do that. I sit down and write, then gather them up later and see which ones I think relate to each other.

KR: So the fact that they’re all about love is just the circumstance of…that’s what you were grappling with when you were writing?
CO: Yeah, and I’m a firm believer that the American popular songbook is full of songs about love, but it could only stand more. I’ve written lots of songs about love in my life, and this was just an extension. But, it certainly had that added undertone of the loss as well.

KR: What did you do differently on this record from your other recordings?
CO: Well my husband was my producer, so everything was different. My friend Andy York, who played guitar for John Mellencamp – and Andy worked on all my previous records – came on board to produce. I used a different studio. The band was the same except for the fact that we obviously had a new guitar player. And, as I said, we pulled in all these special guests. Some of them came in the studio with us. A lot of it was done by flying tracks around the country. There’s a duet with Dion DiMucci, and Dion recorded his vocals in Florida. He wasn’t going to be up here, so we sent him a track down there. Really everything about it was different, which was refreshing and helped with the healing process for me. I think it’s a different sounding record, and some people would say a better record. I don’t know what my opinion on that is. It’s the listener’s opinion that really matters to me.

KR: Do you see a big difference between making music in a studio, and live music? Is it a completely different experience for you?
CO: Not for me, because we try to record very organically. These tracks were recorded with me in the booth with the band, mostly single-take vocals. I believe in organic recording - I think it’s the way to go. If sound requirements didn’t say you had to be baffled from the band, I wouldn’t be. I tried to be baffled as little as possible. We did a couple of tracks at Levon Helm’s studio. He played with us, and we had even less baffling at his studio. The live thing is really important for me in the studio. It’s just rock and roll. There aren’t a lot of overlayed keyboard tracks or anything on my records. As long as you know how to point your amps away from each other...

I’m always out to connect with one person, whether it’s one person in the audience or one person on the other end of the grooves in the CD, or whatever you call them, that's what I'm focused on.

KR: There are a couple of really obscure cover tunes on here. Do you have a thing for obscurity in particular?
CO: Yes, I’m a big record collector. A huge record collector. The Link Wray tune was introduced to me by my friend Cub Coda, the late great Cub Coda from Detroit. Cub was of course a big record collector, even a bigger collector than I was. He had showed me that song a long time ago and we recorded it on the radio the week Link Wray died. One of the few Link Wray songs that he actually sings. That was our way of getting Link on the record. The Dion duet is a very obscure record that I don’t think anybody’s heard of, but I’ve been playing it for dion for a while. He said, "We should record that song you keep playing for me," so that’s how that happened. I’ve never even seen it on a CD. I think it is on a CD somewhere, but not the version that we covered.

KR: It seems an absurd thing that is happening maybe more now that the industry is so saturated – everyone is making records – that the best songs are the ones you’ll never hear.
CO: Yeah it’s true. I think that’s always been true. If you collect, you know the thrill of the hunt – finding something in a shoe box somewhere, and wondering, Where has this been all my life? That was the case with "Cry Baby Cry." As soon as I put it on a record player… I passed it around to all my friends in Nashville and said please cover this.

KR: Do you think you’d do a whole record of obscure cover tunes?
CO: I don’t know. That’s becoming a popular thing and I’m not so fond of the records where they take something that was kind of iconic and try to do it just like it was. I’m more comfortable with taking things nobody’s heard of and working on that. I geuss I could do that – I’ve got the collection to support it. I don’t know – that’s an interesting question. I’m already writing for the next one and I’ve got two or three cover tunes. We’ll see.

KR: What about your song "The Cradle Did Rock" – a tribute tune to New Orleans. Do you have pretty close ties down there?
CO: Yeah, "Cradle Did Rock" I wrote at the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras. Go Saints, by the way. We couldn’t be happier this morning.

Anyway, first post-Katrina Mardi Gras… I was very overcome with everything that went on at that point, it felt very bittersweet. I have great friends at the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic. They’ve been in a lot of trouble lately. They’re going to reissue this record called Gettin Healin, and several of us volunteered our tracks. It’s going to be a digital reissue. All the downloads are going to the clinic and that’s gonna come out around Jazz Fest this year.

KR: Every city’s music scene needs something like that – they do such good work down there.
CO: Yeah, but especially in New Orleans. The ninth ward lost the heart of it. I mean it’s coming back, but when you look at the ninth ward and it’s just a field, and you think of how many musicians lived down there, it’s pretty unbelievable.

KR: Not to change the subject, but how is being the frontperson different for you from playing in other people's bands?
CO: I guess the main thing is the level of responsibility. You have the repsonliblity for the show, as opposed to playing with other people, which can be very freeing. I’ve been a frontperson for a long time so I’m used to it. But it’s a lot more…BB King once said you’re paying the cost to be the boss. And you really are. Everything’s riding on you. You have to be a lot more alert to everything that’s going on onstage. I find it very refreshing sometimes [laughs] to get in the background and sing with someone else. I don’t get to do it that often, but I love it when I do. But I love being the frontperson. That’s what I’ve always wanted and I love getting to do it.

That’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. It’s a good question.

KR: Well, here in Seattle, what’s going on is everyone is in everyone else’s bands…
CO: We have a little of that in New York, but it’s a very tight circle. We don’t really put out records together but we do interact sometimes. That can be a lot of fun. I like to go sit in with Marshall Crenshaw sometimes and things like that.

KR: It’s interesting, though, to hear from songwriters what it’s like for you to sit behind someone else’s songs and submit to their way of writing…
CO: Yeah, and I work with the band on Saturday Night Live and that’s all cover tunes of southern soul music. That’s what I collect, by the way, is what they call deep southern soul from the 60s and the 70s, so I’m used to singing cover material for sure. But that’s obscure material, as well. Very obscure, some of it.

I think you have to make yourself serve the song whether you wrote it or someone else wrote it. You have to get inside the song or else you can’t do it justice. It’s important to look at the song as a communication and realize you’re responsible for giving it life. Not to get too philosophical, but that’s what it’s all about.