Giving good advice: Basia Bulat on road trips, heartbreak and the autoharp

Ahead of playing End of the Road festival, the Canadian folk-pop artist opens up about her new album

Basia Bulat on sparkling form in her gold-sequinned cape (George Fok)

Back in the summer of 2014, Basia Bulat played her largest ever headline show in her hometown of Toronto, Canada, and the following morning packed her bags and drove 600 miles to Kentucky, to record her new album.

“I didn't realise at the time but I was closing one chapter with the last record and making this drive,” she recalls thoughtfully over tapas in east London. It may have been a longer drive even than the distance from London to Glasgow, but she did it in one cathartic stretch. “Maybe I was saying goodbye to a certain part of my life with that show and getting in the car and driving 13 hours. It gives you time to process everything, so I was quite fond of that drive.”

The journey was a culmination of major life changes and goodbyes: Bulat, 32, had split up with her long-term boyfriend and moved from Toronto to Montreal. It was only fitting that she would want to make her fourth album somewhere new, too.

“I felt like I needed to get away and have perspective and feel like I was starting something new, and creatively [Montreal] had always felt like an inspiration to me. I wrote all the songs there. And then recording it somewhere completely unknown to me, but working with people whose music I loved...” she says, referring to Jim James of My Morning Jacket who produced the new album.

“The easiest way for me to make sense of everything is through music. I was trying to get over a broken heart, and trying to find my place in the world that I hadn't known for many years.” She pauses. “Finding a way to talk about it is hard because I feel like the music does it better than I can say.”

It was all perfect material for an album brimming with heartfelt emotion, and the resulting album was her most critically acclaimed yet. Good Advice may be a heartbreak album, born out of a tumultuous time of upheaval and life changes, but it's also her most vital and vibrant.

With a steady but ever-growing following in the UK, bolstered by a stunning performance on Later... with Jools Holland in May, Basia Bulat is well-known in Canada for her gorgeous, lush, and often melancholic, indie-folk – and for her trademark instrument, the autoharp – sharing a stage with many luminaries of the Canadian music scene (she plays a side project Sam Patch with Arcade Fire bassist Tim Kingsbury and drummer Jeremy Gara).

With her last, Polaris Music Prize and Juno Award-nominated, album Tall Tall Shadow, Bulat expanded the boundaries of her indie-folk. With Good Advice she transforms her acoustic sound into colourful, radiant, pop.

“That's something [Jim and I] talked about. Something about every artist that I love or get inspired by is how they're able to grow and evolve, but it's still very much themselves”, she enthuses. “Jim knew I wanted to be pushed, but he didn't want to change who I am. Usually when you follow your intuition it's when you're most yourself, and I didn't want to make another acoustic record. And I think it did make me sing differently.”

It was a development instrumentally, too. Although piano was her first instrument, Bulat hadn't spent a lot of time playing keyboards on her records – until Good Advice. “I have a lot of organs and synthesisers in my apartment, in storage, at my mum's place, all sorts of different places, so I'm finally being able to indulge that impulse and explore that world.”

Bulat grew up surrounded by music – while she was growing up her mother, who'd moved from Poland, was a piano and classical guitar teacher. Both Basia and her brother chose creative paths (he works in film and played drums on her earlier albums). It was her mother who found her first autoharp, at a garage sale, and said “I think you might be interested in this”. Bulat was; she'd seen Bonnie “Prince” Billy Will Oldham play autoharp at a tiny pub show in Ottowa two years earlier.

“As I kept researching, I realised there was this amazing legacy of really incredible women who play the autoharp, like Dolly Parton and June Carter Cash. Its roots are in levelling the playing field for people who couldn't necessarily afford the piano or organ so I really liked the idea of it being this ethereal otherworldly sound, but at the same time extremely scrubby, earthly-sounding, instrument.”

We've met before – I've been a staunch fan since Bulat's 2007 folky debut Oh My Darling. Alongside the colourful elements she's now introduced to her music, even her stage clothes and bold red lipstick reflect this development. Lately she's been appearing in a gold-sequinned cape; it suits her warm and sparkly personality.

“One night in Dublin I forgot my cape and by the time I got on stage it was too late. I did the show without it, but it felt like a part of me was missing... almost as though I couldn't sing to my full ability without it”, she says. “I have certainly embraced that side of me that likes to play and change it up. The pop music that I like the most doesn't hide its artifice – somebody like David Bowie, there's still a real voice that you can connect to. It's been really fun to just embrace that part of myself that maybe I felt like I was hiding for a while.”

Long may she continue to embrace that side of herself, and those sparkles will reach even more people around the world.

“The kind of trip that I'm on, I would not trade for anything. Who knows whether the songs will come out forever, you just hope that when they do that you listen to that voice.”

'Good Advice' is out now on Secret City. Basia Bulat plays End of the Road Festival in Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset, 1-4 September, and headlines Oslo, London, on Tuesday 6 September