Singer and performer Jolie Holland combines folk, traditional country, jazz, and blues on her fourth studio album, The Living and the Dead. (Scott Irvine/Epitaph Records)

The fact that singer-songwriter Jolie Holland called her latest album The Living and the Dead seems appropriate – the Texas born, Brooklyn-based artist seems to move through her life trailing spirits in her wake.

In part, that's because Holland speckles her songs with vivid portraits of real-life characters, both living and dead. Her new record, for example, opens with an aural image of Jack Kerouac and his first wife, Edie Kerouac-Parker, sprawled across a bed. You'd think Kerouac's peripatetic lifestyle would make him a role model for the equally itinerant Holland, but she says she was drawn to the Beat writer's doomed spectre as an example of what not to become. "I think about you, Jack, watching the TV/And drinking booze," she sings in Mexico City. "Shame on you – shame on me/But how could we help it?"

"He went out in the worst possible way," Holland says in a recent phone interview. "Here's a guy who spent years being drunk and not raising his daughter. In some ways, it's [a cautionary message] to the people around me who I saw getting caught up in addiction. I think we can do better. Here's to not being a lame-ass alcoholic, to being responsible and taking magic and power and seeing it through!"

The relationship between inspiration and self-destruction is a frequent theme in Holland's work; in fact, she is haunted by the memory of folks who've gone off the rails. In Sascha, the first track on 2004's stunning Escondida, Holland sings about falling in love with a boy who had "a real live romance with a train."

She may only be in her early 30s, but when Holland sings, you could swear she's trying to banish the ghosts of everyone from Prohibition-era jazz vixens to ancient blues belters from the Deep South. Her voice is a shape-shifting instrument that draws vowels out into thick, sticky taffy. Her vocals seem tinged with the regional cadences of the towns she's passed through — you can tease out traces of N'Awlins, Texas, San Francisco and even British Columbia, where she did a stint as a tree planter in the late '90s.

Those who don't immediately recognize Holland's name may know her as a founding member of Canadian bluegrass revivalists the Be Good Tanyas. Holland wrote the BGTs' best-known tune, The Littlest Birds, which appeared in a Zellers ad. Holland's solo albums almost always feature at least one traditional folk song. On The Living and the Dead, it's a spare, moving version of Love Henry buoyed by a scratchy fiddle. Her distinctive style allows her to inhabit such classics so completely that it's hard to believe she didn't write them herself.

(Epitaph Records)

"As someone who's had no musical training at all – I never had any lessons on any instrument – tradition means a lot to me," she says. "I imagine coming at it from a different angle and reinventing stuff for yourself. In my mind, that's just how you do things. There are a lot of old songs that I think suck, but a good percentage of them are pretty good because it's like a democratic process – it's sort of pre-filtered by history, and only the good shit remains."

While The Living and the Dead is steeped in old-time tradition, it's probably Holland's most contemporary sounding release to date. She's moved away from the murky, convoluted jazz tendencies that defined Springtime Can Kill You (2006) in favour of a cleaner, more coherent version of rootsy Americana. The electric riffs on tracks like Mexico City and Palmyra and the atmospheric guitar noodling on Fox in Its Hole even veer toward rock.

It's tempting to connect this more modern, straightforward sound with her relatively recent move to New York City, but Holland says the new elements in her sound have more to do with the people she's recently collaborated with. They include drummer Rachel Blumberg (M. Ward, Bright Eyes) and Shahzad Ismaily, a sound engineer and composer who's worked with the likes of Laurie Anderson, and co-produced the album with Holland.

The less oblique tone of The Living and the Dead may also be connected to the fact that Holland's writing from a more grounded space than she's ever been in the past. She's still a weird bohemian who's forever drawn to outsider perspectives. But where she used to write songs that were, as she explains it, attempts to "distract myself from suicidal thoughts," she's reached a point in her life where her biggest challenge as a performer is to figure out how to channel that dark space when she's feeling good.

"I don't have to be a wreck, but I'm such a heartfelt performer. I think it's disgusting to be too guarded, in a way. I can't stand that insincerity. Everything is real for me when I'm singing it, whether it's a practice or a shit-hole dive — I'm always in the song," she says. "In my mind, it seems really grotesque, almost like I'm doing this performance in blackface onstage. Because it comes from this really on-the-verge mentality and it seems wrong to rock it out onstage. That's not showbiz – it's psych ward! But I wrote this stuff, and it's my job to be responsible for it. And I know it can be cathartic for people."

The Living and the Dead is in stores now. Holland plays Toronto on Oct. 29 and Montreal on Oct. 30.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.