(Veronica Henri/QMI Agency)

Melissa Auf der Maur says the timing was never better — both professionally and personally — for a multi-media release of her long-awaited sophomore record, Out Of Our Minds, in stores Tuesday.

The 38-year-old Montreal musician — who played bass with both Hole and Smashing Pumpkins in the '90s — also has an accompanying short fantasy film involving Vikings, witches, a topless woman, and time travel, as well as a graphic comic book of the same name.

“I come from a fine arts education,” said Auf der Maur, 38, who went to a performing arts school as a teen and studied photography at Concordia University.

“From the age of six through the moment that I was pleasantly hijacked by '90s rock music, for me it was always equal. ... I was nurtured in an education and environment where it was more about if you have something to say, use whatever tool you need to do it.”

Those thoughts coincided with Auf der Maur’s previous label, Capitol-EMI Music beginning to fall apart in 2006. Her second album was in limbo, and eventually she asked to be dropped from the roster.

“Everyone working on my record was fired in one day,” said Auf der Maur, sitting on a couch in a Toronto hotel suite recently.

“One day changed everything. Once the label started to crumble and my relationship with Capitol ended, that’s when it became clear to me, that actually it’s a new model. And that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, it’s simultaneous. Like as the technology that’s going to save and nuture my project is growing, it’s also dismantling the old box that I had been living in. So about two years ago was really when it all became clear. Not only am I going to go multi-media but I’m going to go all independent. I’m going to become a business person in order able to protect the art.”

In the end, the title track of the album came first — then the film, then the graphic comic book, and then the rest of the record.

“It’s really travel out of our minds, into our hearts,” she said of the title song, which she describes as the entire project’s thematic core.

Helping Auf der Maur in her creative process was director and boyfriend Tony Stone (Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America) — who began helping her make the experimental psychedelic short film, Out Of Our Minds, two-and-a-half years ago. The couple wound up taking it to the Sundance Film Festival last year.

At Sundance, she also hooked up with her PHI Montreal, and together, they formed the multi-media production house/label MAdM PHI.

“The amazing part was when the Montreal Musuem of Fine Arts randomly saw (Out of Our Minds) and put it in as a contemporary response to the pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse for the past six months. And that was to me, the moment where I realized that I had done the right thing in art. I just don’t want to chose one over the other. And that’s why 21st century, 2010, I feel at home for the first time. The portal has happened, with the Internet, the way we digest arts and visuals. And now I realize the '90s was too old fashioned for me. Now I know I was waiting for the future to arrive to be able to do what I wanted to do.”

Ultimately, Auf der Maur — who has lived with Stone for the past two years in a small town in the Catskills region of upstate New York — said the six-year journey between her first and second solo records found her falling in love with music again.

“In many ways, the film was a way to save my album because my album, for a moment, was sitting in limbo in legal contracts — so I had lawyers discussing the fate of my music. So, yes, my heart was broken in some ways.”