E-Mail This Article to a Friend Baby Blue steps Mary Lou Lord takes the slow road back into the spotlight BY BRETT MILANO

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into Mary Lou Lord at the Middle East, where she’ll be performing this Friday night, and she asked whether I’d heard her new album. I said I hadn’t gotten a copy yet, and she flashed me a rather foreboding look. "That’s all right, dude," she replied. "It’s not very good."

Even from an artist known to be as candid as Lord, that’s not an admission you hear very often. So it seemed likely that she was having a bad day or a severe case of the pre-release jitters. Or maybe, after a six-year gap since her previous studio album — Got No Shadow (WORK/Sony) — and a retrenching period that saw her return to the Boston area full-time, return to busking on streets and in subways, release a live album (City Sounds, on Rubric), and have a daughter, she really had made a bad album.

Fortunately, that didn’t turn out to be the case, though Baby Blue (Rubric) is definitely a lower-key effort than Got No Shadow. On that 1998 disc, Lord and her collaborators (producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, guitarist/songwriter Nick Saloman of the neo-psychedelic Bevis Frond) built a sparkling, alternative-radio-friendly sound out of Lord’s reference points, which include English folk rock, the California singer/songwriter tradition, and the work of modern troubadours like her friend the late Elliott Smith (who appeared on her first album, and to whom the new one is dedicated). The music on Baby Blue makes fewer attempts to court the mainstream: it’s an old-fashioned singer-songwriter album with a laid-back, folkish feel. Saloman takes a greater role as producer, guitarist, and main songwriter; Lord’s own writing contributions are down from seven tracks to three. In fact, it’s practically a Bevis Frond album with Lord as guest singer.

Yet Lord manages to personalize these songs, just as she’s done with a wide range of material in the past ranging from Shawn Colvin to Daniel Johnston. Whereas the songs on Got No Shadow dealt with her adventures in the rock underworld, those on Baby Blue are more about getting older, taking stock of failed dreams and imperfect love affairs. (One of Lord’s songs, "43," is about middle age, though she’s still in her late 30s.) But the new disc resolves with Pink Floyd’s "Fearless" (easily the most, and maybe the only, uplifting song in the Floyd catalogue) and a reassuring Saloman tune, "Old Tin Tray." The breathier tone of her vocals suits the introspective material, and the album holds together as a personal statement, one that her fans are likely to enjoy more than she appears to.

Interviewed at the Abbey Lounge a few days after the Middle East encounter, Lord seemed a little friendlier toward her effort. "The first album was like a huge, high-profile photo shoot; this one’s more of a snapshot that we took on vacation. I’d say it’s about a mid-life crisis, from a woman’s point of view — when I wrote ’43,’ I was thinking about the Big Star song ‘Thirteen’ and thinking what that guy would be like now. It’s a pretty intense album in that respect, kind of sexually charged in a ‘Mrs. Robinson’ way. I thought it was important to embrace that."

But the real reason she was critical of the disc is more complicated. Sometime last year, she began to have vocal problems; at times her voice would jump uncontrollably, and sometimes it wouldn’t come out at all. After much confusion and a few visits to the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, she was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition that affects control of the vocal cords. Although the condition has become well known only in recent years, it’s something that numerous singers have struggled with. The most famous example is Linda Thompson, who stopped performing for decades after she and Richard Thompson split up in the ’80s.

"It feels like you have a cricket in your throat," Lord explains. "It’s a lot worse if you’re tired or under stress. But I can accept it better now that I know what the hell I’m dealing with. It’s like being a pitcher and you break your arm: you have to practice and learn how to pitch again. So now I’m back to learning how to sing. I mean, I never had the greatest voice on earth, but I’ve been able to work through my abilities and come across as a very honest singer. So it felt pretty terrible to lose whatever little shred I had." She’s also picked up some encouragement from Linda Thompson. "She’s sent me e-mails saying, ‘Hang on, little sister.’ You can’t ask for better company than that."

Lord was booked to make the album while all this was going on, and she decided to go ahead with the sessions. "I know that people are going to hear this quiet, sultry, and odd delivery of mine and think it was intentional. To be honest with you, I know where it stands — I know it’s a good, solid record. I just wish I hadn’t been so lazy with it. A couple of times I decided to say I didn’t care how it was recorded, and I did a few of the songs before I really got to know them. I always try to keep a certain honesty in my delivery, and when I did this album, it was hard to get to that place where Mary Lou goes and makes it all believable. Especially since we’ve started rehearsing the songs to go on tour, and I’m hearing how they should have sounded on the record."

Some would say that Lord’s career has already had more of its share of drama. As a ’90s artist with a high indie-rock profile and a major-label buzz, she hit the gossip columns a few times (her brief involvement with Kurt Cobain and subsequent battles with Courtney Love have been well documented elsewhere). Her own life has been through its ups and downs, but a major turning point came when she cancelled the final leg of her Got No Shadow and went into rehab. At the same time, she found out she was pregnant (daughter Annabelle is now five), and that was the end of her major-label career.

"I know I’m a control freak. And some people thought I lost control at that point. But it was really where I got my control back. Nobody can tell you when you’re ready to make a big life change. There’s no right time to have a baby or buy a house: those things just happen. I know that I was never cut out to be some friggin’ rock star. I didn’t want the attention. I just wanted people to hear a good song. It probably has to do with the way I grew up. I’m neurotic as hell, and I’d never even been on a plane until I was 23. So that tour was planes every day, hotels every day, and I wasn’t willing or able to make those sacrifices. I didn’t turn into a drunk so I could have a party. It was more a matter of ‘Get me through this plane ride.’ " Meanwhile, the Sony imprint she’d signed to went under and was absorbed by Sony/Epic, and she sued to get herself off. Since her contract stipulated that she couldn’t be assigned a new label or an A&R contact, she won. "I got awarded the same money they’d already paid to sign me. So I played the game right."

Nowadays her life is quieter, more stable, and, she says, more upbeat. She lives in Beverly with her husband, Raging Teens frontman Kevin Patey, and runs the vintage-clothing store that she’s dubbed Retro Vixen. "The people that shop there don’t know my music unless I went to school with them." And between higher-profile shows, she’s been doing the same street-corner gigs that made her a local favorite 10 years ago. She recalls one impromptu show during South by Southwest in Austin last year: "Chris Ballew [from the Presidents of the USA] walked by and caught me busking, and I talked him into coming up and joining me. The girls watching didn’t recognize him, since he hadn’t been on MTV for a while, and he started making up a song about their birthday. And the girls picked up the box, passing it around and saying, ‘Give him money, he’s good!’ I know that brought him back to when he used to play Harvard Square. Those kind of moments are priceless."

Of course, not all of them are. Last September, she found herself playing outside Fenway Park after the venue’s Bruce Springsteen concerts, and she was covering one of the Boss’s prime ballads, "Racing in the Street." To which a less-than-sharp onlooker responded, "Play some Springsteen!" As Lord recalls, "I looked back at him and said, ‘I am, you fuckin’ moron!’ Okay, I don’t usually say things like that, but I needed to put him in his place. I can only imagine what I would have said if it had happened five years earlier."

Although she’s now touring with a band for the first time since the Got No Shadow era, it’s likely to be much different from the last go-round. For starters, instead of putting together a Boston band, she’s annexed the Los Angeles band Gingersol to back her up. "It’s funny, I barely know these boys, and I feel like I’m the older woman. Five years ago, I would have freaked out, but it’s sounding great." And there won’t be any mid-tour meltdowns this time around. "I realize now that it’s all about being relatively healthy, having a nice family and friends who care about you. Sure, it would have been great if I’d made a million dollars, but I’d probably still be in debt."

Mary Lou Lord performs downstairs at the Middle East, 480 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, with Gingersol this Friday, February 20; call (617) 864-EAST.