It took a three-CD collection for Johnny Cash to address fully the topics love, God, and murder, but Rose Polenzani has been known to polish off all three within a single song. Name an area that would be too scary for most singer-songwriters to visit and you’ll probably find she’s spent time there.

Last October at the Middle East, Polenzani did one of the more moving local shows I’d attended all year, all unsettling narratives and chilling beauty. The highlight that night — and to judge from the response her best-known tune — was “Olga’s Birthday,” whose Old West title character gets caught seducing the sheriff’s wife and is locked up and raped by various holy men. But instead of venting anger, Polenzani gives the story a shadowy, David Lynchian feel. It’s the vulnerability she ascribes to Olga, plus the sinister framing of the rape scenes (“Olga, you’ve been sinning, I’ll bring you Jesus for your birthday”) that kept me awake that night.

That night in October also marked Polenzani’s first show as a Bostonian. Raised in Chicago and then based in Santa Barbara, she’s recently camped in town, in part because of her car. “I had to get my car registered here because it had lapsed in California,” she explains over a vegan lunch at the Grasshopper in Allston. “I realized I was sick of getting it registered, so I thought I’d try to stay here for a while.” Before moving to Boston, she’d been working with local musicians for her new Rose Polenzani album — her third release overall and second for Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s Daemon label (Ray is a fan and sang some back-up on her previous disc; Polenzani is touring with the Indigos for the second year in a row this summer). The core group of players — guitarist David Goodrich, drummer Mike Pearl, bassist Lou Ulrich, and engineer Francisco Lugo — fleshed out the home-demo quality of her previous two discs, maintaining a band sound throughout. Three of the 10 songs on the new disc are full-fledged rockers that make sense in context; each half of the album begins acoustically and builds to the loud outbursts.

Notably absent on the new disc are her two favorite themes, religion and sexuality. “There’s less about homosexuality, because my personal experience has changed,” she explains. “As far as religion goes, I’m actually more religious than ever and I don’t want to be precious about it, because now it means something to me. Before I was writing as a vocal critic of the way people experience God, or as a proponent of the way I’d like to experience God. So I was on the outside looking in. My experience over the past year has eliminated the experience of those songs, so now I have more perspective when I sing them.

“ ‘Olga’s Birthday’ came from a time when I was writing pretty fast, I’d whip impressions out in one day. I woke up with the name Olga in my head and the guitar was in open D, so that’s where it started. At first it felt liberating to write about two woman lovers, but now I feel it’s about misinterpretation of Jesus. Everything they do to Olga makes her feel worse about herself, so it’s a horrible misuse of some of the most beautiful texts.”

Not that the new disc is sweetness and light. “Bad Dreams,” which seems to be about childhood cruelty, again shows her mixing beautiful and disturbing elements in roughly equal parts. And her account of the song doesn’t make it any more upbeat. “It seems that about two years ago, I came up with a really useful tool to punish myself. It came from being beaten up psychologically by someone who was in my life at that time, so if that person wanted to do it to me, I would make sure it got done. What I would do is to go inside my head and beat myself up; I would imagine myself on a playground being beaten up. If I’d do this for 10 minutes or so, I’d really begin to feel the pain in my jaw, in my head. And I could give myself nightmares if I did it long enough.”

Did she at least purge herself of that need by writing the song? “It’s more of an escape, but you have to go in to get out. Writing something solidifies what’s in my head, so I can get beyond it. If I write something down, it’s easier to see it in the third person.”

The new songs do evince a certain optimism — cautious, to be sure, since her most uplifting statement (from “Thom II,” the sort-of love song that closes the disc) is “I’d like to cut myself, but it looks like it really hurts.” Her explanation is that “I’ve started feeling more like a normal person. You know how everybody in high school feels like they’re crazy, and that went on a long time for me. I’ve only lately started to realize that my experience in the world is not that different from other people’s, and it’s a real relief to wake up to that fact. If anything makes me feel normal, it’s things like having to pay my bills and do temp jobs. Maybe it just took a lot longer for me to grow up than I ever thought it would.”

Heading off the obvious question about whether she’ll still be as good a songwriter if she’s happier, she’s already released her first angst-free love song, “The Same Height” (Written too late for the album, it’s up for free download at www.rosepolenzani.com.) “It’s my first really sweet and loving and kind song, and people really like it. I feel like I’m always going to be struggling in some part of my life, and the struggles I have are always going to be universal. I’m still way into the dark stuff and I don’t want to write fluff. But I do want to have some fun.”

LUCKY 57. It’s seldom a great compliment to praise a band for their cover songs. And unless you’re talking about the Lyres or Rock Bottom, it’s considered bad form to play more than a couple per set. But damned if Lucky 57 didn’t pull out a killer batch last Saturday night when they played a Mikey Dee benefit at the Abbey Lounge in Somerville. As a country band with punk roots, they got both angles right, playing the Ramones’ “Questioningly” and Johnny Thunders’ “Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” at one end, Bob Dylan’s “Nothing Was Delivered” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water” (the William Bell song most associated with Gram Parsons) at the other. The songs found their ideal match in the band’s loping beats and steel-guitar twang, which were topped off by Kip McCloud’s deep, bourbon-soaked voice. Lucky 57 didn’t even get around to the Lucinda Williams numbers that usually highlight their shows. If this band lived in Austin instead of Boston, they’d be up to their ears in critical praise and free BBQ.

McCloud in fact bears a striking resemblance to ex-Quivvver guitarist/singer Carol DeFeciani, who admits she changed her name because people couldn’t pronounce it. After three years together Lucky 57 have just released their first CD, Lovely Melancholy (produced by the ubiquitous David Minehan), on their own Looseground label. The music is scrappier and more upbeat than the title would indicate, with a Crazy Horse guitar sound on some tracks and a cantina steel-guitar sound on others (Rustie Chud plays the lead guitar, former High Risk Group member Sue Metro the steel). And McCloud/DeFeciani, who’s always been a good singer, has finally found the confidence to step forward.

The relaxed feel of Lucky 57 is a notable change from Quivvver, a band who started out as pure fun and ended up with a mess of hassles. Their rough-edged pop and buoyant personality (not to mention that impressive supply of wigs) won them a lot of local fans circa 1995-’96. But drummer and lead singer Kristina Kehrer exited just after their album was pressed up, leaving the remaining Quivvvers with a basement full of CDs to unload. McCloud took over as lead singer, and though the second Quivvver had a great sound — loud swamp rock, like Creedence gone grunge — they proved too many miles away from the original band. “The second band was harder-rocking,” McCloud explains, “but it didn’t have the ambiance of the original Quivvver. We figured that we could sell the CDs if we kept the name, so it backfired on all fronts.”

Around this time she was hitting her late 30s and trying to figure what kind of music still turned her on: she’s the first to acknowledge that Lucinda Williams showed her the light. “I think she made everything OKAY for me, because I was hungry for something that I wasn’t getting out of indie pop. A lot of times it’s a guy thing — not to run anybody down, but a lot of indie-pop guys are really into the Beach Boys influence, and I never related to that. I did relate to the female singer/songwriter thing, and I got something from Chrissie Hynde in the ’80s that I never got from anybody else until Lucinda came along.” Although Lucky 57 have been known to play whole sets of Lucinda covers, none of them made the disc, which is all original save for the William Bell and Thunders tunes. “She’s somebody that I feel pretty humbled by as a songwriter, the way she puts her life experiences into a record. I love playing those songs, but I don’t think I’m ready to commit them to a record yet.”

Not having written lyrics before, McCloud admits she was nervous about putting her own songs on disc. But anyone who can rhyme “chaser” with “erase her” in the first song and use the phrase “Let’s blow this pop stand” in the second doesn’t have much to worry about. The twangy chorus of “All the Places” and the late-night-bar scenario on “Done” are songwriting moves her heroine would likely appreciate. And with the disc hitting stores, she feels she’s catching a second wind. “I can see the rootsy thing cropping up here, and I can see being part of it. But it’s pretty funny — I used to think that when I got to a certain age, I’d be a washed-up jazz singer.” Lucky 57’s official release party takes place at the Lizard Lounge next Friday, May 18.