Ferron says a lot of what she has to say on "Turning Into Beautiful" on the very first song, an uncharacteristically jaunty country tune called "More Than That."

	Ferron is "Turning Into Beautiful" on her first CD of new material in 10 years. Click photo for larger image. Ferron Where: Rex Theatre, South Side. When: 8 tonight. Tickets: $15; 412-381-6811.

"And it's a perfect night," she sings over the steel guitars, "just to sit and hold this peace in sight/To shun the dark and be the light ... have it be alright."

"Turning Into Beautiful" is the respected Canadian singer-songwriter's first collection of new material in nearly 10 years, during which time the world went a little madder. Throughout the record -- another exquisite and moody work full of breathy vocals and fluid, jazzy arrangements -- there's a sense of trouble outside, but of this poet withdrawing into the personal.

"When the world gets overwhelmingly political and full of animosity," she says, "the only thing you can do to keep yourself strong is have a deeper and abiding personal connection with your life. That's what people do to stay sane."

Of course, it's not what everyone or every artist does (see Anti-Flag, Green Day, Toby Keith, etc.), but Ferron chose to follow her own muse, and it was a quiet one.

"As I get older," she says, "there are many spirit and soul plays going on. I think we waste our time if we get involved in other people's dramas. I'm not a politician, other than that I like to have the people who listen to me feel that I'm alert and conscious and caring, but I'm not ever going into politics, so why would I pretend that that's my drama? I had that dilemma when I wrote 'It Won't Take Long' in 1983. That song is about my dilemma of: 'Who am I to talk about this?' The other part is saying, 'You're a citizen; you're a person,' so I waver on that, back and forth."

"It Won't Take Long" was a thoughtful epic, delivered with distinctive phrasing, that had critics from Rolling Stone and other publications making Dylan comparisons when they spoke of Ferron. It appeared on 1984's "Shadows on a Dime," the Vancouver artist's second record (or fourth, if you count the two self-released albums in the late '70s), which helped solidify her place as a powerful voice in women's music during the '80s.

In the '90s, Ferron ignored her own advice to a young Ani DiFranco backstage one night: "Don't sell out to a record company." Although she maintained creative control -- no dance mixes, thank you -- Ferron says a lot of promises weren't met with Warner and, after 1996's "Still Riot," she exited, soured on the music industry.

"When I look back on it, I was with a woman," she says. "We had a daughter; she was born in '94. I wanted to be the father I never had. I wanted to be the parent I never had, so I made some decisions for her security that weren't wise in the long run. It's OK. Everything is a play. You don't just come to this Earth saying, 'I want to learn how to live as a folksinger.' There's a whole spiritual world where we're trying to work out losses and gains. Giving my power away that way was something I had to work out. I won't do it again."

After the major-label affair, Ferron retreated from the studio and decided, she says, to chase poems instead of money. She did some touring and took a position as an inhouse writer at the Institute for Musical Arts, a program for women in Bodega, Calif. In 1999, she returned with an album of mostly '60s covers called "Inside Out" and then, in 2000, a retrospective called "Impressionistic."

Then, last year, she called her producer, D.B. Benedictson, and suggested another record of covers -- this time a joking answer to k.d. lang's "Canadian Hymns" called "Canadian Hers" -- featuring female artists. He said, "Let's do a Ferron record," and they dug into her journals.

"I was writing," she says of that down time. "I don't pay attention to it because you just want to be in touch with your spirit and you don't think about the audience. So what I didn't know was, yeah, I was writing. I had these journals. I'm kind of funny with journals. I write and then I hide them or lose them. I was writing, but I wasn't noticing. Then I got together with my producer, and he said, 'I think you've got stuff,' and I said, 'I don't think I do,' but when I looked, I did."

In her journals, Ferron had been dealing with her own dramas, including the death of her stepmother, whom she says saved her life. So the singer does her share of reflecting on loss on "Turning Into Beautiful." She also discovered the presence of a father she didn't know she had.

"We suspected, my sister and I, and we put an article in the paper outside Toronto, and someone responded," she says. "It was a great thing to happen. But I discovered that it made me angry and rejected and abandoned in some way that I had never thought that I would feel. I had to come through and find the compassion, and that's when I realized I could write a CD, when I wrote 'In the Mean Time.' "

It's an extraordinary song that finds her singing, "Here on Earth, I am something of a song/But once I drank your whole abandon wanting only to belong."

By the end of it, she realizes what she learned from him and how she can, in an inverse way, project it on to her own daughter. "You are with me as I love her, you are in me as I care/You have shown me not to hold back/knowing what's gone's ... not there."

Says Ferron, "I wrote then, 'Even someone's absence can be a teacher ultimately.' I saw that and felt it, and it was like a tenderness. It just relieved so much stuff. You can gain with what's there; you can gain with what's not there."

"Turning Into Beautiful," like much of Ferron's work, is poetic and understated, shying away from songwriting conventions of hooks and choruses. Appropriately, it brings her full circle back to releasing her own records.

"I'm not sure that thinking deeply is a commercial thing," she says. "Maybe that's not what people want when they listen to music. But that's what I do and I feel really happy in the end that I have been doing it as long as I have. The song 'Shadows on a Dime' in '92 was basically saying, 'I wonder how long this run is going to go for.' That's a long time ago now."