What we have here is a unique opportunity to examine the decade known as the '90s from the perspective of someone who missed it completely.

No, Luba wasn't in a coma. Her career was.

"The '90s was a strange decade," she observes. "Every decade is, I guess. It's just weird. I came from the '80s and all of a sudden it's 2000. I remember thinking when I was 12 years old, gee, in the year 2000, I'm going to be this old and probably going to have a big family. And here it is in 2000 and things didn't quite turn out that way." She laughs, "No flying cars yet."

Luba Kowalchyk (her band was known as Luba) is on a cross-Canada promotional tour that hit Edmonton yesterday - just one step in bringing her music back to life. Her first album in 11 years, From the Bitter to the Sweet, is in stores now. A tour is soon to follow.

Why now?

"It feels right," is her simple answer.

With a self-effacing humour and not a trace of pop star attitude, she's candid about the events that led to her semi-retirement in 1990.

Following a string of hits in the '80s, Luba decided to take a break and live a normal life for a while. It also gave her time to concentrate on family priorities. She finally even got around to learning how to drive. Royalties from songs like Let It Go, which enjoyed steady play in dance clubs over the years, allowed her to buy a house in the mountains north of Montreal - where she still lives with her dog, cat and a fish named Hector - and take some time to herself.

"I just needed some time to regroup," she says. "The band split up. I was married to the drummer (Peter Marunzak) and we'd split up. Being together for so long, people want to do other stuff. You can't blame them. So I had to rethink what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go."

And so while Luba went from one of Canada's top pop stars to the "where is she now?" file, the music business continued its relentless pace. She took it all in from her snowy haven in Quebec. Grunge happened (note tense). The Internet became all the rage. And a quartet of Canadian women - Celine, Alanis, Sarah and Shania - became superstars, which actually made it harder for domestic artists to make it, Luba claims.

"You got great Canadian acts out there essentially being ignored because they don't have that stamp of approval from the U.S. We could talk about that all day.

"I was never the 'I want to conquer the world' type of person," she says, mimicking Celine Dion. "Sure, I love to sing to as many people as possible, but to go as far as to manufacture things is scary. I heard stories about certain people saying, 'Are the features of my face aligned properly?' That scared the heck out of me. And the music, too. Everything was just so precise and soulless. Not everybody, but a lot of it."

Hearing the music on From the Bitter to the Sweet, fans may find it more melancholy than Luba's soul-stirring sound of the '80s. Songs like Is She a Lot Like Me? reflect her feelings dealing with a painful breakup years after it happened.

"Overall, it's sort of like a mood record. It's not totally depressing. But sometimes I love that stuff. When I was younger, I'd put on an Elton John record or something and start crying. I need my crying records, I need my dance records, you know, everybody needs something. Mine is probably half and half. I think there's something for everybody here. I'm not yelling and screaming as much. I didn't feel like I needed to belt it out."

While she could count the shows she did during the '90s on two hands, it only took her a couple of gigs to shake the rust off. Luba says she's ready to hit the road again - with just a few minor alterations from the circus-like atmosphere of her youth. Like scheduling sleep.

"It's always hard. I remember. I'm remembering now, singing at 6 in the morning." (she was on the A-Channel's Big Breakfast yesterday morning.) "The travelling. I think it's difficult for anybody at any age. I don't know how Tina Turner does it at 60. She's amazing. I met her. When I won a Juno, she came up and congratulated me because she was there. I thought that was the classiest thing. Here you had people walking around who think they're somebody and they're really not and she just made a beeline for me. I have a real respect for her. I remember watching her on Ed Sullivan. And then all of a sudden here she is coming up to me. That's what I would aspire to. I don't consider her a diva, although if anybody deserves the title, she does. I don't even know what the heck diva means."

It means a prima donna - something Luba certainly is not.