It’s been more than ten years since Erin Tobey released her self-titled first album, but the Bloomington, IN-based artist kept plenty busy during the intervening years, maintaining a career in visual art while publishing her own local zine and acting as frontwoman for indie punk rockers Fat Shadow.

 Middlemaze, her long-awaited second album, was always simmering on the back-burner as she found novel ways to procrastinate with less daunting projects before finally entering the studio with her husband and brother to record the ideas she’d been refining for the past decade.

Almost impossibly, the album feels worth the wait — deliberate yet so full it feels like the entire sum of all those years she stayed silent, culling unusual influences, recording melodic voice memos and making fresh new lyrical observations that range between gently philosophical and effortlessly witty. The starry, shifting freak folk of the resulting album is an involving triumph far more sonically interesting than most singer songwriters can ever hope to manage.

We spoke to Tobey about her lengthy songwriting process leading up to Middlemaze, and how long we can expect her next solo album to take.

Homebase: Bloomington, IN

Describe your music to someone who's never heard it before.

I'd like to think the new record is very accommodating to all moods. Picture the music someone would make who grew up listening to Paul Simon, followed by East Bay pop-punk, followed by Drag City freak-folk, and followed by this archive of Guinean pop music in the British Library collection.

How did you first start playing music?

My first memory of playing music was recording songs from the radio onto cassettes using this little boombox with a microphone, and then playing it back, singing the harmony parts and recording THAT onto a second boombox — and so on, back and forth. I was determined to figure out all the parts in that Cranberries song “Dreams” in the wild end section where everybody is yodeling, for example.

What do you love about Bloomington, IN?

It’s like The Simpsons where there’s a cast of townspeople you know and love who appear in the background of every scenario you find yourself in. Like, Oh here I am at the co-op and there’s the lovable Bumblebee Man buying yogurt-covered pretzels in bulk. There are a lot of charming things about living in a small city. It’s also really beautiful here for much of the year.

Was it difficult creating a solo album after so long?

Yeah, it really was. The longer I waited, the heavier it felt — it felt like an insurmountable task. I had imbued the project with all these expectations that made it become this lurking demon in some ways. Whatever hubris I had before that had initially propelled the project in my early twenties was gone, and I didn't know what it all meant anymore. I was just thinking about it too much, obviously. I had to force myself to do it. Once I started, the fear just started melting because really it was based on some weird illusion. It turned into an awesome triumphant feeling.

How is it different recording a solo album versus working as part of a band?

It's a lot different in some ways. If you're used to being in collaborative bands, recording a solo album but with a band puts you in this role of conductor where you have to be really on the ball and have a vision that you can communicate clearly. With that feeling of control comes a lot of self-criticism, for me. I needed to figure out how to be patient with everybody involved including myself, and not control-freak all over everything, to trust the people I was working with and let go enough to make it joyful.

What was your songwriting process like for this album?

I wrote these songs over years and years. The oldest one is over 10 years old. The majority of the songs are from the last couple years, but the writing definitely spans a decade of evolving practices and moods. In general, I record a lot of voice memos when I’m driving or walking around. I do a lot of writing vocally and in my head. Never been one to just noodle around on guitar for hours, for better or worse.

How did working with your brother and husband affect the recording process? Is it just easier working with people you're close with?

In some ways it's easier working with people you're really close with. Those kinds of relationships use unspoken communication that can be really magical in playing music together. There's also an interesting challenge in it for me, too, because I'm more comfortable criticizing people that I really love, or holding them to unrealistic standards. Ultimately, though, you’re going to love and cherish an album you made with people that you cherish. It has a psychic value that makes the product feel really meaningful.

But all that aside, my husband Jeff and brother Matt are both extremely skilled and creative musicians, and so are my friends Mike Bridavsky and Kyle Houpt, who we recorded the album with, so the short answer is: the experience was awesome and the record is good because they worked on it.

What or who was influencing you while making this album?

It’s not really in my character to listen to the production on an album I love and obsess over recording techniques, I just absorb stuff and it manifests in different ways. I was listening to the Damien Jurado album Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son. You can probably hear some of that in there. Lots of weird little percussion and interesting sounds. Always very inspired and energized by my community of Bloomington musician friends that I’m usually working on stuff with or around at any given moment: Amy O, Busman’s Holiday, Vollmar, Mike Adams at His Honest Weight, The Hollows, Patrick Jennings… Many more. Got a lot of good things going here and a lot of cross-pollination.

Were you trying to do anything different, musically or lyrically, when recording the album?

I only had recorded one other solo album, more than 10 years ago, and that experience was completely different and special in its own way — one or two mics, with a digital 8-track in my friend Rich Diem’s living room in Florida. I have done a lot of recording since then with other projects and have learned quite a bit about what I like and how to track. I brought it all with me for the new record. So yeah, the approach was quite different and the result is therefore quite different. That’s just the technique; musically and lyrically, everything is evolved. Ten years is a long time.

Are there any unifying themes between your visual art and your music?

I think I explore my own fears using all the media available to me. That theme definitely shows up all over the place in whatever I do, dealing with things that are terrifying or debilitating in whatever way. Shining light on something scary makes it shrink, or so I’ve found.

What were the biggest challenges you encountered while making it?

The challenges were mostly mental, as I talked about before. Discarding paralyzing expectations and poisonous mental loops and just starting the project was hard. But then later, it was like, why was that so hard? It feels so easy now.

I like how your music often balances punk and folk sounds. How do you find the right balance between the two for each song?

There’s no formula! It’s like how do you decide how much peanut butter and how much jelly to put in a PB&J? Just feels right. I’ve been enjoying trying to generate as much excitement and emotion as possible at lower volumes. More sustainable in the long term, health-wise.

Do you have plans to release solo albums more frequently in the future? I'm impatient for more.

Releasing Middlemaze is kind of an experiment to see how it feels inhabiting this project again. Practicing for tour has felt really good. I have a pretty big backlog of unfinished material that could get a breath of life if that’s the way the wind is blowin’. Anyway, I’m always working on something. My other band Brenda’s Friend (with my friend Amy Oelsner) has a lot going on right now, and my other other band Full Sun (with my excellent-songwriter husband Jeff Grant) also has a new EP coming out. Can’t stop, won’t stop!

One random fun fact about you?

I’m in a comedy troupe called Sitcom Theatre where I’ve portrayed an elderly woman, a little boy, an alien, the president, and have danced to the “Y’ALL READY FOR THIS?” jock jam in the Bloomington Fourth of July Parade.