Singing between the lines The unorthodox beauty of Laura Veirs BY MIKAEL WOOD

Laura Veirs has nothing against love songs; she just digs other kinds as well. "I feel like there’s an infinite number of things to write about other than the standard fare," the Seattle-based singer-songwriter says over the phone two weeks before beginning a tour with indie-folk balladeer Sufjan Stevens that will bring her to the Somerville Theatre for a sold-out show this Thursday, September 8. "And I want to get into something else. Also, I feel my work often comes from a dream world — it’s not very analytical or intellectual or literary or anything. It’s just that it’s coming to me from this bizarre place. I love that."

A dreamy sense does pervade Veirs’s fifth album, Year of Meteors (Nonesuch). Recorded with producer Tucker Martine and Veirs’s band, the Tortured Souls, it’s a lush tapestry of manicured folk pop — thoughtful meditations on nature and space and, okay, a relationship or two. "There’s more on the new album than I’ve ever written," Veirs admits of the album’s odes to romance. "I mean, I don’t think they’re that typical — but they are love songs."

In her writing, Veirs pairs the precision of her singing and guitar playing with a looser instrumental vibe. She attributes that in part to Martine, a member of the Seattle jazz-funk outfit Mylab who’s also worked on recordings by Jesse Sykes and Bill Frisell. The renowned jazz guitarist appeared on Troubled by the Fire, Veirs’s 2003 album on Bella Union; he also introduced her to Nonesuch senior VP David Bither, who issued Carbon Glacier in the US last year after a British release by Bella Union, the label run by Cocteau Twins Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde. In "Lake Swimming," from Meteors, Veirs describes in flowery, colorful language exactly what the title implies; Martine takes the lyrical cue and surrounds her dry-yet-supple voice with layers of treated percussion and eerie keyboard trills. Together they get as close to the tranquil, watery experience as sound likely can.

"They’re not pointless," Veirs says of the inspirations she pulls from the natural world. "I feel they have a place in my personal experience. Like, ‘Lake Swimming’ — I like the second verse of that song. It’s just this dream world about swimming in a lake, but everyone swims in a lake. Everyone knows what that’s like."

A Colorado native, Veirs moved to Seattle after graduating from college in Minnesota in 1997. She knew the West Coast was her destination, and most likely San Francisco, but after a visit with her brother in Seattle she decided to stay, seduced by the landscape and by the DIY musical spirit that flourished in nearby Olympia. "A lot of things have changed my writing over the years," she says, shrugging off her 1999 Laura Veirs debut as a hasty live recording. "The main thing is existing in the Northwest and being around other songwriters here and seeing their approach — just sort of taking in the Northwest energy and the way that people play. People like Built To Spill have been very influential."

You can hear that on Year of Meteors: Built To Spill frontman Doug Martsch shares Veirs’s fascination with offbeat lyrical tropes, and in several places on the new album she indulges her inner guitar goddess. "Why aren’t people expanding what they’re writing about?" she asks about her songwriting peers. "Why is it so limited to this one thing — love or my angsty life? Why can’t we think about more creative ways of describing the infinite experiences we have in our lives?"

Laura Veirs + Sufjan Stevens | Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square | Sept 8 | 617.931.2000 | SOLD OUT