Recording her 2009 album Hunter, Hunter turned out to be almost as difficult and emotional an experience for Amelia Curran as the romantic breakup that precipitated it.

Out of the ruins of a failed relationship, Curran wrote two dozen original songs. Songs with searing emotional lines and poetic lines that many critics have compared to literary giant Leonard Cohen.

But in the recording studio, Curran was unforgiving, throwing out half the songs she had intended to record, and rewriting those that made the final cut.

If she didn't feel strong emotion, the song was out, or massaged into shape.

It was a long, wrenching process.

She had planned to spend three weeks laying the new songs down. Instead, it took 21 months filled with despair, indecision and some consolation.

"You can't fake what I write," Curran says from the Halifax Jazz Festival.

She's enjoying the afternoon gig with Alex Cuba. "I'm not sure where songs come from. I make an effort not to analyze it too much."

Bye Bye Montreal, The Mistress, Love's Lost Regard, Last Call, Curran's songs become bits of dialogue between two broken lovers. Listening to her sing them is like eavesdropping on a private conversation. For Curran, playing them means living the breakup all over again.

She can joke about the experience of recording Hunter, Hunter now, but making her fourth album in six years was a searing, emotionally exhausting experience.

"Hunter, Hunter" sounded more aggressive than hunter-gatherer because I wanted to describe the chase for love when you've been cut down by loneliness and can't think of anything else," the Haligonian explains.

"Sadness demands to be communicated. It's the easiest thing to write about because it tells you what to say. Sometimes, the songs wrote themselves. I couldn't stop them. But there were other times when I had writer's block and was scared that I was tapped-out and didn't have another song in me.

"Fortunately, the songs come when you stop trying to think about them. From where, I'm not sure, but they come."

It turns out all that angst and her attention to detail was a good thing for Curran, who in April won the Juno for best solo traditional and roots album, earned four nominations at the 2010 East Coast Music Awards and was nominated for a Polaris Prize for Album of the Year.

Not bad for a kid who started playing guitar and writing songs as a teenager and later busked on the streets of St. John's. Curran recorded her first album in 2000, and has released four more since. Her 2006 release, War Brides was nominated for two East Coast Music Awards.

Curran plays Wakefield's blacksheep inn this Friday at 8:30 p.m.

Tickets are $12 online at Ticketweb.ca, or $15 at the door. For information visit theblacksheepinn.com