Catie Curtis

It’s not all that hard to find a musician willing and able to offer a guided tour of life’s dark clouds -- but making the acquaintance of someone able to hone in on the silver lining, well, that’s an altogether rarer occurrence. Catie Curtis’s ability to do just that radiates from virtually every groove of her appropriately-titled ninth studio album, Sweet Life.

“I probably wouldn’t have written a record this positive if things were going great in the world and we had peace and prosperity,” the singer-songwriter explains. “There are lots of reasons to be unhappy or anxious at this time, and I think the album is as much about resilience as anything. In order to stay sane and keep moving forward you have to be able to look at all the bad news around you and see the beauty that is there alongside the trouble.”

Sweet Life abounds with that positive energy-- from the warm and winsome coming-of-age allegory “Are You Ready to Fly?” to the languid, sepia-toned “What You Can’t Believe,” on which she disperses the doubts that gather, as the lyric puts it, “under darkening clouds.” That song, like many of the disc’s dozen offerings, reaches out to listeners with a welcoming blend of burnished keyboards and slide guitar -- a departure from Curtis’s most recent recordings, which were more spare.

“We’re at this juncture where a lot of folks are working on their records in home studios and making them sound craftily small, but I really wanted to go in the other direction toward a big, warm, friendly sound,” Curtis says of her first Nashville-bred recording. The songs are meant to be open and confident, and I don’t know that they’d have carried as well if they were done stripped down and bare bones.”

They’re anything but stripped down. Backed by an array of Music City vets, including longtime Bonnie Raitt collaborator George Marinelli and Alison Prestwood, who’s accompanied such artists as Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, and Peter Frampton, Curtis stretches out as broadly as at anytime in her 12-year recording career. That’s evident in the playfulness of the ‘30s-styled barroom plaint “Lovely” as well as in the ‘70s soul groove of “For Now,” which exudes Muscle Shoals sultriness.

As is her wont, Curtis also slips a surprising cover into the mix on Sweet Life – this time an affirming rendition of “Soul Meets Body” by kindred alternative-rock spirits Death Cab for Cutie, a song she says she was drawn to because “I was really taken by the way these young guys are able to talk about wanting to live on a spiritual plane, which is really different than a lot of the music of the ‘90s which was really critical and jaded and ranting.”

There’s never been anything remotely jaded about Catie Curtis.. From the first time she picked up a guitar -- an instrument given to her gratis by a neighbor who asked only that she promise to learn to play it -- the native of rural southern Maine has used music as a sort of sonic super-glue to bring people together. She brought that to the fore on her charming 1995 debut Truth From Lies, a disc on which she tangled with heartache and -- on the affably goofy “Slave to my Belly” -- had a full-on dialogue with that body part, and ramped it up further on her 1997 follow-up, which was named Album of the Year at the Gay and Lesbian American Music Awards.

While her early recordings captured a goodly bit of the Curtis charm, her live shows marked her as that rare breed of singer-songwriters -- the kind that refuses to take themselves as seriously as the topics they delve into. Using her whip-smart sense of humor – one part small town New England warmth and one part Ivy League wryness – like a chef uses a well-stocked spice rack, she brought a little bit of the Borscht Belt to the sometimes staid folk circuit.

“I feel like the growth for me has come from performing live and realizing how you can be playful and even silly while acknowledging the hard stuff,” she explains. “When you’re in a room with a bunch of strangers, you need to laugh, or at least I do. If I couldn’t laugh a little every time I went onstage, I don’t think I could do this.”

While Curtis is prone to peppering her concerts with knee-slappers, Sweet Life is punctuated more by smile-inducing moments, like the narrative of “The Princess and the Mermaid” -- a lullaby-like concoction inspired by the two daughters she and her partner Liz have adopted in recent years.

That close-to-home inspiration is matched by a helping of the highly personalized social observation that Curtis has become known for -- this time in the form of “Fools,” a song she was impelled to write after learning of the senseless murder of New Orleans artist Helen Hill, a high school friend of her partner’s. Rather than focus on the tragedy, however, Curtis uses the song to celebrate Hill’s life -- “and how alive she was when she was alive,” as the singer puts it.

“She lived with a real sense of joy and I think we all need to do that,” says Curtis. “Joy and gratitude are things I’ve really come to value, and I hope that comes through on this album.”

That joy is not only palpable throughout Sweet Life, it’s as contagious as can be -- giving a much needed shot of delight to all who cross its path.