Deb Talan is well-known as a musician, thanks in large part to her time in the The Weepies, a cult-fave folk-pop duo that turned DIY success into a label deal, sold-out shows and collaborations with pop stars like Mandy Moore and Colbie Caillat in the 2000s.

But Talan is a visual artist and a writer, too; her website features a treasure trove of her colorful drawings and paintings, as well as her Survivor Blog, where she writes about her experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and incest.

She doesn’t really schedule time to focus on this or that or the other thing, she said in a recent interview.

“I really rely on my internal guidance system and energy. I live intuitively, and — knock on wood — it’s gotten me along pretty well,” she said. “I wake up each day … and I have this nice little creative space behind my little house, and I’ll be like, ‘I’m going to go in there and see what happens.’”

What happens usually balances itself out, she said.

“If I’m not feeling it in one area, I usually am in another,” Talan said. “I would say they kind of play off one another and seem to take turns.”

On Tuesday, Talan will bring her music to The Belfry in Sisters as part of a solo tour of the Pacific Northwest, where she lived more than two decades ago. She’s touring behind the release of her excellent new album “I Thought I Saw You,” an 11-track collection of catchy, sumptuous songs about love, loss, leaning in and letting go. So … about life, basically.

Recently GO! caught up with Talan for a chat about her art. It’s below, edited for space and clarity.

GO!: On your website, you write, “Making Art and Music has been a huge part of my healing journey.” How so? How do those things interact?

Deb Talan: The impulse to create is something that I’ve always had. I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t make art. And I would say that sometime during my 30s, I realized how helpful it was to have an outlet to pour my sort of unresolved emotional experiences into, and then to have this really tangible thing afterward.

I know I was accessing the same level of emotionality in my early years, but it took me some time to get a little deeper and also just know myself, and then there was an interaction of those things. The more I wrote, the more I got to know myself.

GO!: “I Thought I Saw You” is your first album since 2017. What’s it about? How did it come to be?

DT: When I divorced my now ex-husband and Weepies partner (Steve Tannen in 2020), that was such an enormous rupture and so challenging that I didn’t really know where I was going to end up. I knew I would always make music, but I didn’t really know what role it would play in my life.

But I was writing throughout the whole thing. And when I started writing things that felt hopeful, I started integrating the losses more and looking forward a bit more. So a bunch of the songs on this new album are very hopeful, and for me, they kind of embody the range of the album, which is, y’know, “There’s loss but there’s also a turning toward hopefulness.”

I get bored with a song that doesn’t have some degree of tension in it, so I hope these songs have that.

GO!: You collaborated closely with a co-producer, Bryan Vanderpool of The Well Pennies, and your friend Dan Padley on this album. What did they bring to the process?

DT: You know how when you want to have an effective creative collaboration with someone, it’s really important to start with “Yes, and…”? I didn’t even have to consciously think that. It just felt so natural to be like, “I respect what you do so much. It’s very easy to start with ‘yes.’” They made me want to default to “yes.”

GO!: I can only assume that working in that kind of collaborative creative environment impacted how the album sounds.

DT: I mean, I’ve never gone through a recording process that I didn’t feel changed me in some way, so yes, I feel like I’ve been expanded and have grown. And I feel like each song was impacted by the collaboration that happened.

I don’t use this word very much, but both (Bryan and Dan) feel like blessings. I’m sure every human being is like this, but there are times when things feel difficult and you feel really alone here, and then there are times when it’s like, “Oh, thank you, wherever that came from.”

If You Go

Who: Deb Talan

Cost: $20

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 8

Where: The Belfry, 302 E. Main Ave., Sisters

Contact: belfryevents.com

Ben Salmon is a Bend-based music journalist and host of Left Of The Dial, which airs 8-10 p.m. Thursdays on KPOV, 88.9 FM and streams at kpov.org. You can find him on Bandcamp and X at @bcsalmon.