Mary Timony's new album carried her through upheaval and loss

Many songwriters strive to create characters, fictional people whose thoughts may have elements of their own, but should not be construed as being theirs, i.e. autobiographical. Not so much for Mary Timony.

“It’s never about a character,” the singer-guitarist says from her Washington, D.C. home. “I think of art, we do it because it’s a way of working through things. It’s like dreaming, processing the events in your life. When you try to control what it’s about, it’s never good. For me anyway.”

Timony, who came to prominence with her Boston art-rock trio Helium in the mid to late-1990s, is talking about her expansive career. It started in D.C. with Autoclave and includes time in the great, all-female post-punk bands Wild Flag and (the still extant) Ex Hex. Specifically, though, about “Untame the Tiger,” her fifth solo album that dropped on Feb. 23.

The 54-year-old says the last four years have been like going through a blender. “I had a long-term, 12-year relationship [with furniture designer Jonah Takagi] ending within a week of my dad getting cancer in the spring of 2018 and then having an operation and then getting frontal lobe dementia really fast.”

And then a month later, her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. “They both started going through this process of letting go of life at the same time,” Timony says. “Which is, now that I look back, kind of amazing that it was so parallel but it was, like, a lot.”

Timony, who lived nearby, spent parts of those years essentially caretaking for her parents while working on music in her spare time. Her father died in April 2021; her mother last year in November. The album carried her through.

“Not to be dramatic, but that was all I had,” Timony says. “Everything else was falling away. All of my other close connections were leaving. Me and my record was all I had. I have to keep making records because it’s the only thing that makes me feel like a normal person.”

Not that the writing came easily. “When I’m going through a writing phase, I’ll definitely write a bunch of junk that I hate,” Timony says, “but the ones that really work, it’s such a good feeling. It’s the one way I’ve learned to cope with my own — crap, basically.”

The breakup with Tagaki inspired about 90% of the songs, she says.

Consider a verse from the album’s kickoff tune, “No Thirds”: “A brand-new day, it still hurts like hell/ You said nothing, like there was nothing to tell/ Now the dead leaves are blowing around in my mind/ We only know this one life at a time.”

Or “Dominoes”: “When you said it was forever you looked me right in the eye/ But the next second you were gone, and that’s when I realized/ That was a lie.”

Both songs are sung with what might be called deceptive mellifluousness — her voice and the layered acoustic and electric guitar lines coast along a pleasant plane, but there’s real hurt sting underneath it. And “Untame the Tiger,” in general, has less overt aggression, frenzy and distortion than one might expect from her previous band and solo efforts. It is not an album rife with anger and vitriol.

Dave Mattacks, the English-born, Marblehead-based drummer who came of note in Fairport Convention, played on five songs on  “Untame the Tiger.” “Mary is obviously schooled – in as much as she knows exactly what she’s doing,” Mattacks says, “but she seems not to let that get in the way of her playing or her song construction. I feel that quality is kind of left-of-center, in a very good way.”

Timony sees the album as a journey through her past. “Things that weren’t helpful that I’m trying to do better with now, I guess,” she says. “That’s me. I’m a weirdo, like a lot of us are, especially creative people.”

Timony also came to a certain kind of reckoning. “I do feel that I’ve turned into someone I didn’t expect I was going to be,” she says with a slight laugh. “This is my life: I live alone and I do this. I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have kids, I don’t have a husband, I’ve got two 4-year-old cats, brother and sister Hieronymus and Hildegarde.”

She gave some thought, too, to her career — making records, touring — in middle age. “Women have a slightly different trajectory if you stay as an artist,” she says. “It’s a really hard thing to do with your life and sometimes it’s easy to stop doing it if you’re not doing it for the reason that it makes you feel better. I’m pretty much a diehard artist. I always will be, I guess.”

A 20-date tour starts Feb. 28 with a stop at Somerville’s Crystal Ballroom on March 2 and Amherst’s The Drake March 3. Though Timony usually plays in a trio format, this lineup boasts five musicians, with Timony joined by guitarist-vocalist Betsy Wright (who also plays in Ex Hex), pedal steel guitarist Anna Wilson, bassist Chad Molter and drummer David Christian.

“I thought a lot about it, what we needed to do to do a good job performing the songs,” Timony says of putting the band together. “I put a lot time into that and ended up getting these people who I love as musicians and people. At the end of the day, all of this is about connecting with people and then when I have the opportunity to go out on the road, and meet people and connect, that’s great. It’s hard, but it’s great.”