Melissa Ferrick :: Here comes the good stuff

For indie musician Melissa Ferrick, being on the cusp of 38 is the perfect place to be. On the jaunty title song of her new CD Goodbye Youth, Ferrick saucily crows, "Goodbye youth, goodbye lust, say hello to the rest of your life, here comes the good stuff!"

"It comes from putting your crap behind you," Ferrick says of the bouncy song that celebrates the security and wisdom of adulthood. "Now you have a car and a house and maybe that's a little heavy, but getting all that stuff is the hard work. Now it's time to enjoy life."

Maybe it's because she's single now, but Ferrick hastens to clarify that she's not serious about bidding farewell to lust. "The irony in the title is great," she laughs. "I had a hard time with that line, because it's not really true. It's really about knowing the difference between lust and love."

It's been a year of ups and downs for Ferrick. Professionally, her career is hotter than ever: she recently toured with Ani DiFranco and opened for k.d. lang. But she's coming out of a period of introspection on the personal front, having ended a long-term relationship and taken a long look at herself.

"I never used to take time between relationships, "she muses. Silent for a moment, she then chuckles, "As lesbians tend to do! Now I've had almost a year of being on my own. It's been really eye opening to find what I lean on and what I look for how ... but also to learn that I can and do take care of myself."

That personal journey can be traced be traced on Goodbye Youth, whose tracks are roughly arranged in the order in which Ferrick wrote them. The first few tracks were written almost a year ago, when Ferrick was "in a really place. Then the breakup started happening, and the rest of the material is more introspective. It comes from wanting to be alone and think, and slowly get back to that good place again."

Now Ferrick is celebrating her renewed confidence, and upcoming birthday, with a gift for her fans. Her new disc is her purest yet, a simple, stripped down session with just Ferrick and her guitar. Ferrick says she thinks this is the album her fans have been waiting for, because it's the closest she's yet come to capturing the experience of her live shows.

"People always say 'I like your records but I like you better live," she explains, "and they can't quite nail down what the difference is." It took Ferrick herself a while to figure out the missing quality from her studio albums. She knew the production needed to be simple, but she sensed something was missing in her attempts to record her new songs in her home studio.

She needed to get into an unfamiliar studio in Brooklyn, in between tour dates, where she recorded the whole disc in a day. The sense of urgency helped her find the immediacy she was looking for. "It's amazing what a difference it makes," she says, "to record as if you were doing a live show. I had no click track and no headphones. When you have the headphones on, you can hear absolutely everything about your voice, and I can get stuck in identifying what's wrong with my voice, instead of just singing and letting it be what it is."

Ferrick sounds a bit rueful about how long it took to reach this simplicity. "But then," she says, "I've been known as an artist who had a backwards career. That word is used a lot with me! Because I had a major label deal at 20 years old, and then went indie, and then I lost everything and started over in '98, and in 2000 I started my own label and worked hard at touring.

"In the last eight years it's been a lot of banging my head against the commercial wall, trying to figure out things like how to get on WBOS, or how do I get into the Orpheum? The music industry has changed so much, but we're still following some of the rules from the 90s that aren't relevant anymore."

On this release, Ferrick is trying a new strategy to navigate the ever-changing landscape of the music industry. Applying her newfound appreciation for simplicity to marketing and distribution, Goodbye Youth is currently only on sale at concerts. It will soon be available on iTunes with an exclusive extra track, and Ferrick is unsure when the disc will hit traditional retail outlets.

"This is the Goodbye Retail tour," she chuckles. "This record probably won't ever be out there in this form. When we finally put it out in retail, it will have new artwork and some new songs. I think that's a cool way to keep people interested.

"You have to find new ways to promote. It's not just about the music anymore. If it ever was."

Ferrick admits to being a little nervous about this new approach, but she says knows she's exactly where she needs to be. "This record, it's really not commercial. But it's for the fans. Finally I feel I'm giving them what they want, and I'm really proud of it. So I'm starting over. I'm really solid mentally and physically, I'm happy and content, and this is the time to put that stability and confidence into my career."

She's ready for the good stuff.

Melissa Ferrick plays at the Berklee Performance Center on Saturday, Sept. 13, with opening act Rose Cousins. Tickets $30. Info: 617.931.2000 or www.ticketmaster.com.