Shawn Colvin wants to set the record straight about “A Few Small Repairs.”

Like many classic albums before and since, “A Few Small Repairs” is widely considered a breakup album. At the time of its release, in 1996, the folk-rock singer-songwriter was going through a divorce, and songs such as “If I Were Brave,” “The Facts About Jimmy” and breakthrough single “Sunny Came Home” tackle loneliness, uncertainty and depression head-on.

But Colvin is no stranger to what she calls the “melancholy romantic vibe.” Her three previous albums before “A Few Small Repairs,” and the subsequent recordings that followed, all pursue similar themes to varying degrees.

“I think this one is overblown in terms of being a divorce record. It just is, and who knows, I may have contributed to that at the time, I can’t remember,” Colvin said recently from her home in Austin, Texas, a day before starting rehearsals for the “A Few Small Repairs” 20th Anniversary Tour. She’ll return to the Tower Theatre on Tuesday. “But this isn’t a f***-you to my ex-husband by any stretch of the imagination. There’s some songs on there like ‘If I Were Brave’ that represent the loss of what was going on and the questions I think we all ask ourselves after a breakup about how does this work and what went wrong.”

According to Colvin, this universality is what keeps fans discovering and rediscovering the album. The tour, Colvin’s first with a full, six-piece band since the initial shows behind “A Few Small Repairs,” coincides with reissues of the album on vinyl and expanded CD featuring seven live tracks. She’ll perform the album in its entirety at the shows.

People certainly latched onto “Sunny Came Home,” which launched Colvin into pop stardom in the late ’90s. The song, based on the album’s cover painting of a three-eyed woman holding a lit match as a fire rages in the background, peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1997 and won Record and Song of the Year at the 1998 Grammy Awards.

Despite the line “a few small repairs” showing up prominently in the song’s second verse, “Sunny Came Home” was one of the last songs written for the record, after the title and cover art were already picked out. The cover painting, created by Colvin’s friend Julie Speed, originally had a different title; Colvin took “A Few Small Repairs” from the title of another of Speed’s paintings.

“I thought it really fit, and that was that,” Colvin said. “And then when I started writing ‘Sunny Came Home,’ I had no idea what I was gonna do. I had the music from John (Leventhal, producer), and I could not figure out what to do. And then I had this idea: Why don’t you write about the woman in the painting, and why don’t you take ‘a few small repairs’ and put it in the song? So it really worked, and I love the song, but it was kind of a savvy thing to do, if you will, which is something I do not tend to do and something I haven’t done since.”

The album further solidified Colvin and Leventhal’s musical relationship. The two launched their careers together with Colvin’s Grammy-winning, 1989 debut album “Steady On,” produced by Leventhal. “A Few Small Repairs” was their second collaboration; Leventhal would go on to produce the album’s 2001 follow-up “Whole New You” and 2006’s “These Four Walls.”

Colvin described the sessions for “A Few Small Repairs” as having “a loose sort of atmosphere where anything went.” In the reissue liner notes, she talks about feeling the pressure from her label at the time, Columbia, to deliver a hit radio single. Of course, “Sunny Came Home” would end up being that hit, but Leventhal and Colvin focused on the songs rather than radio.

“I think we had learned a lot in the interim (between collaborations),” Colvin said. “That first record did do well; it got some notoriety, which was important to us because we didn’t set out with that first record to make a hit record or anything. We just had our sound and wanted to make the best record we could and had no expectations, really. But it was well-received, so I think that we were able to take that success or the confidence we gained from ‘Steady On’ and relax a little bit for ‘A Few Small Repairs.’”

Colvin has nine more studio albums under her belt, including last year’s duets collaboration with outlaw country songwriter Steve Earle, simply titled “Colvin & Earle.” In October, she’ll release a sequel to her 1998 collection “Holiday Songs and Lullabies,” based on “Lullabies and Night Songs,” by Alec Wilder and Maurice Sendak. And she’s working on another new album with Leventhal.

Naturally, after 21 years, they’re not concerned with duplicating “Sunny Came Home.” At that time, Colvin was one of a number of female singer-songwriters such as Jewel, Sheryl Crow and Sarah McLachlan starting to get airplay on male-dominated pop radio.

“For me, it was kind of a perfect storm of the right song at the right time,” Colvin said. “And all the other women that were getting airplay, you know, I loved those songs, and it was a big deal because the radio stations were kind of balking at playing two women in a row, like back-to-back songs. That just wasn’t done, which tells you a lot. So there was a moment in time when they couldn’t really deny it, and I think that sort of prejudice is over.”

What: Shawn Colvin Band, with Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend

Cost: $54, $72 or $160 for VIP meet-and-greet, plus theater preservation fee

Contact: towertheatre.org or 
541-317-0700.