It has been three years since singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile’s last release—just enough time to make some wholesale changes in almost every facet of her life. With The Firewatcher’s Daughter, those changes have materialized in the most positive ways—a new label, a new child and a renewed artistic freedom. It adds up to a massive exhale heard throughout the record.

“There was just so much confidence,” Carlile says over a crackly phone while driving through the foothills outside Seattle. “We all came into this with no conception. Everything I did in the past had been so constructed. We worked on honing and crafting the songs. I wouldn’t say it was an intentional decision to not let that happen this time, but there was so much going on in my life at the time that I was able to let this be more stream of consciousness. What I was really working on was preparing to be a mother.”

During The Firewatcher’s Daughter sessions, Carlile’s wife was already nine months pregnant, and the children of longtime bandmates Tim and Phil Hanseroth (aka The Twins) were running around the studio. The groundwork—demos or rehearsals—hadn’t been laid, so songs were “getting learned and sussed out” in the studio. Pressure and tension filled the space. Rather than postpone recording, Carlile jumped in, channeling that energy into a firestorm of passionate, emotionally charged and rock-heavy tracks that left her “raw and vulnerable.”

“It’s the perfect storm of my life reaching a point where there’s a healthy dose of anxiety and excitement with the birth of my daughter, plus feeling really creatively free from the record label. And there’s the  time it took to forget ‘the way that things are supposed to be done’ and the time it took to remember how to do it [the old] way again. Was there stress and tension in our band? Yes. This was definitely not easy.”

The Firewatcher’s Daughter walks the fine line between rock and country. Though Carlile says that she’s “clumsy,” and that her “falls” typically straddle that line, the album remains a brave departure from 2012’s gentler Bear Creek, and even her 2007 breakthrough, The Story. Instead of the slick production that smoothed out Carlile’s inherently rough edges for a more “accessible” country/folk-oriented album, there is a first-take, record-on-the-fly approach that restores the edge that marked her early recordings over a decade ago.

“On our early records and in some of our early writing, you can really hear a rock-and-roll influence in our music,” she explains. “It changed over time and there was a bit of an absence, I think, that was perpetuated in part by what the record labels thought I could be. And that was based on [sales and airplay] numbers.

“Those rock-and-roll tunes didn’t make it onto the records, or were changed before they could make it onto the record,” she continues. “To be honest, with The Firewatcher’s Daughter, there was a real change. The songs experienced freedom because there was nobody to say, ‘Oh, that’s a little heavy’ or ‘The guitar’s a little too loud.’ It reminded me of 2000-2001, when I felt safer to write like that.”

“Wherever Is Your Heart” opens the album with a gentle, rolling twang before exploding, Carlile’s voice cracking into a rock uproar. “The Things I Regret” follows a rollicking piano line that swells like a flooding river of driving bass, guitar and drums. And then there’s the ironic “Mainstream Kid,” a forceful, raw, blues-punk track—the kind typically cut from her albums—blasting her former label’s attempts to control her. Carlile sings, ironically: “You can own me/ You can control me/ Individuality has never stood a chance against you… There’s never been a better time/ To set the bar beneath the masses.”

“It’s kind of like being a little bit proud you’re not accessible in the mainstream,” Carlile says with a laugh. “There’s something of value that sets you apart, but you wear it like a badge of honor and you’re proud of it.”