Folk-rock duo Nomad, left, and Mare Wakefield will perform at Anker Farm on Saturday. The duo will play songs from their seventh studio album “Time to Fly,” due out January. (Submitted photo)

Like many a folksinger before her, Mare (pronounced Mary) Wakefield tells stories through song. And in order to tell these stories, she needed to learn to be an observer.

Fortunately, she had an early start. As she puts it in her webiste bio, she “lived in eight different places before she was 10.”

“I was always, always, always the new kid in school,” Wakefield said recently while driving between tour stops in Montana with her husband and musical partner, Uygar “Nomad” Övünç. “I was always the one who talked funny or did things weird compared to all the other kids, and it really taught me to be an observer. I would be quiet and just listen to how the kids talked and watched how they did things, and I do feel like that has carried over into my life as a songwriter now.”

Often, those observations come at unexpected times. A few years ago, Wakefield and Nomad performed on a daytime TV show in Wilmington, Delware, to promote a show that same night. Also on the show that day: a local prize fighter and the reigning Miss Delaware.

“‘The boxer and the beauty queen’ just popped into my head,” Wakefield said. “I was watching to see if they would interact with each other. Honestly, they didn’t have much contact with each other at that time, but I kept thinking about it, and I wound up writing a song called, ‘The Boxer & The Beauty Queen,’ that’s on our upcoming record. I feel like that kind of thing — watching other people and imagining what’s going on with them — started when I was little.”

Imagination is the other key ingredient for Wakefield, who will perform with keyboardist/accordionist/melodica player Nomad at Anker Farm for the third year in a row Saturday. “Land of the Free,” another song from the upcoming album, “Time to Fly,” Wakefield and Nomad’s first in four years, finds Wakefield taking on the persona of a Donald Trump supporter who punched a protester in the face at a rally last summer for the then-presidential candidate.

“There was a little sound bite that I heard on the radio where he said — the guy who punched, the aggressor, the guy who started the fight was like, ‘Well, he deserved it; he was acting un-American,’” Wakefield said. “Just super kind of nasty voice and just so much bitterness, and I just got so upset by that. … I was just so upset by how divided we were, that as an exercise for myself, I tried to get inside that guy’s head and be like, what could he be thinking? And of course, I don’t know him at all — I don’t know his name; I don’t know anything about him, but this is just my imagination. But that song starts with the line, ‘He deserved it, standing there acting un-American.’”

It follows that Wakefield and Nomad strive to bring people together through their music, in more ways than just songwriting. Nomad, who was born and raised in Turkey before attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he met Wakefield, often leads Turkish music workshops at the duo’s tour stops. (They don’t have one planned for Bend, although the intimate nature of Anker Farm could allow for a less formal exploration, according to Wakefield.)

“I think for some of these places — we’re playing northwest Montana; we played southwest Wyoming; we’re playing some pretty out-of-the-way places — and for some of these people, (Nomad) may be the first and perhaps only immigrant from a Muslim nation that they’re ever going to meet,” Wakefield said. “There’s this idea of what a Muslim immigrant might look like. There’s this kind of idea of the other, and then if we can counter that with, here’s Nomad, and he’s cute, and he’s funny, and you like his music.”

This also is reflected in the duo’s D.I.Y. touring — it’s just the two of them in a Subaru making the trek out West — and penchant for informal show settings such as house concerts, which make up at least half the shows on this tour, Wakefield said. The Anker Farm, which hosts a handful of concerts throughout the summer on its deck, is in keeping with the duo’s philosophy.

“House concerts are really the place where I feel like a connection really gets made with the audience,” Wakefield said, “because usually you get to chat for a bit. For example, at Anker Farm, there’s a potluck gathering before the concert, and so people bring dishes, and Anker Farm shares some of their delicious heritage meats. It’s really quite an event, quite a spread — I mean, I would go just for the food. But it’s a great time also to just meet the people that are there, and if they have questions about us and what we’re doing — a lot of people are interested in the fact that we live in Nashville, or that we travel so much or that Nomad is Turkish.”

And for Wakefield, who lived in Oregon for 10 years, including in Bend for two years while attending Central Oregon Community College, the show is an opportunity to reconnect with old friends. The two have traveled to Oregon via the Midwest every year since moving to Nashville from Boston in the early 2000s. “It’s a big, convoluted loop that we pretty much do every year,” Wakefield said.

In the past few years, Wakefield has opened up her songwriting process to fans, as well. Many of the songs on “Time to Fly,” due out in January, were originally written and demoed as part of Wakefield and Nomad’s Song-of-the-Month Club, in which, as the name suggests, fans sign up for a free download of a new song each month.

“When I’m home, honestly, I try to write every single day for at least an hour a day,” Wakefield said. “And I am not saying that I write awesome songs every day. Sometimes, it’s just a couple lines. Sometimes, it’s a song that’s not very good, frankly; it’s just whatever. But I look at it like getting on that treadmill and exercising those muscles. I want to keep my songwriting muscles in shape so that when true inspiration comes, or when a good idea comes, I’m ready for it. I’m in shape, and I’m not struggling with structure or form or how do I make this rhyme happen?”

What: Mare Wakefield and Nomad

When: 5:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Anker Farm, 61900 Anker Lane, Bend

Cost: $20

Contact: ankerfarm.com