Annabelle Chvostek
Apr 18 (8pm). Blue Chair Café (9624-76 Ave). Tickets: $15 (advance)/$18 (door), available at 989-2861.

Would it be too obvious to say that Annabelle Chvostek is a resilient woman?

Yes, yes it would; but necessity drives all story leads, and besides, it’s an absolutely true observation. After serving two years with The Wailin’ Jennys as a replacment for Cara Luft, Chvostek struck back out last year to concentrate on her solo career, ignoring the acclaim and commercial success that followed the group’s 2006 Firecracker album (which featured the Chvostek-penned “The Devil’s Paintbrush Road,” that year’s most-played Canadian song on folk radio).

Her fifth release, Resilience, includes songs written during and after her tenure as a Jenny, with a few more hammered out as the recording progressed.

“We started out with close to 20 songs, and jumped into the songs we were most excited about,” says Chvostek over the phone from just outside of her home base in Montreal. “By the time the 12th [track] was done, that was it. There was one extra that we worked quite hard on that didn’t make it—I think my producers were pushing for songs that were poetically analogous.”

Seems they were thinking thematically as well; Chvostek characterizes the album’s title as a metaphor that runs through the record, moving from the personal to global perspectives. 

“It happened in the sequencing,” she explains. “I had planned in prose what I hoped to accomplish with the record.... It seemed to start at personal reflections on relationships and love, getting through heartbreak and moving into new love, and then into broader reflections on the world.”

The rest of the album loosely follows that template—ruminations on obsessive love that winds into lust (“Piece of You”), or out-of-control passion (“Runaway Lane”), or reveries on scattered memory both personal (“Seven Years”) and as pointed social commentary (“The Sioux”). The lyrics tell stories that the music frames in varied ways—feinting to rock (“I Left My Brain”) and back to roots (“Seven Years”), with little touches of electro. 

It’s an expansive record, with an all-star list of collaborators: Chvostek’s guests include ex-Ani DiFranco keyboardist Julie Wolf, country-folk singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier on backing vocals, and Michael Jerome Browne providing strings. Chvostek herself shows off impressive chops on a list of instruments including accordion, mandolin, Rhodes piano, violin, guitar, and beat programming. She even teamed up with Canadian folk legend Bruce Cockburn to write “Driving Away.”

“When I gave him the words I had to the song I don’t know quite what I was expecting back, but he sure made interesting choices,” she laughs. “Now there’s a man who knows how to work the personal into the political.”

And then there’s “Racing With the Sun,” a somber little number by noted children’s entertainer Ella Jenkins, who as a black woman in the ’50s and ’60s encountered a great deal of discrimination while plying her trade. It might seem like an odd choice for the album’s only cover song, but Chvostek feels that it shares similar qualities with her own self-penned tunes. “The song has its own resilience to it as well,” she notes. “It was written in 1957 when the world was waking up to civil rights.”

Chvostek was introduced to Jenkins’ oeuvre by a friend who gave her a compilation with one of her tracks. She picked up on “Racing With the Sun” immediately and brought it to the Wailin’ Jennys, who put their spin on it before Chvostek decided to include it on her solo album.

“That was a spontaneous thing, not planned at all,” she says, “and I like how it has that live feel because of it.”