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“I can’t write by a fireplace,” says Inuit singer Elisapie Isaac. “I need a window. I need to feel connected to something, to see the sky or whatever. I think it’s because I’m from this small town where you can see far. No matter what building I’m in, my inspiration is the window.”

Isaac spent almost three years sitting by her window, so to speak, and the songs she found there became the substance of her recent solo recording debut, There Will Be Stars. After several years as the singing half of the Quebec electro-folk duo Taima, the 32-year-old performer and filmmaker (who began a short Canadian tour on Feb. 4 at Toronto’s Drake Hotel) has mapped out her own musical landscape.

“I just wanted it to be sweet and warm, I wanted it to breathe,” she says of the album, which was produced by Éloi Painchaud. She’s talking mainly about the shape-shifting sounds on the record. The songs, by contrast, are often about hard, uncomfortable situations: the ragged end of a love affair; the intensity of a deep winter spent in a small Northern settlement (Salluit, in Nunavik); the dislocation many Inuit feel whether they stay in the North or head south, as Isaac did 10 years ago.

“Tears and emotions, that’s what motivates me,” she says.

Inuit musician and filmmaker Elisapie Isaac in Toronto last year.

Isaac moved from Montreal to study journalism, then quit school to take a job researching a circumpolar documentary about Inuit people, and made her own half-hour NFB documentary: Si le temps le permet (2003), about aboriginal men in the North and their conflicted feelings about traditional and urban ways. With guitarist Alain Auger, she also started Taima and made a Juno-winning record that sold 25,000 copies.

A second disc was on their agenda, but the initial sessions felt “a bit forced,” Isaac says. She bought a guitar and started writing, not at all sure she could assume the creative functions that, in Taima, had largely been Auger’s.

One of the disc’s strongest songs was also one of the first written. Why Would I Cry? is a calm and stately tune about reclaiming personal autonomy at the end of a punishing relationship. “It’s a love song, of course, and also an affirmation,” she says. “I was at a point when I was tired of crying all the time, and this song was the turning point, when I decided that what I choose to do is really my choice.

“It was also a turning point musically, because the melody and the way it’s written are so simple. I knew that was what I wanted to do.” In a way, it was a return to the powerful simplicity of the English hymns and folk songs she sang as a little girl, often on local Northern radio.

Isaac grew up in an adoptive family, after she and a brother were “given away” to a distant relative. The hard phrase sounds mild in her softly accented English.

“Up north, it’s really common for people to be adopted, not taboo in any way,” she says. “My mother wasn’t married, and my grandmother said, ‘The next baby you have, you should give it to my second cousin, because she’s older and she can’t have kids.’ My grandmother passed away before I was born, but my mother respected her decision. She almost had no choice. But I never heard her crying over it, and I have a great relationship with her.”

Her father is a Newfoundlander. Isaac is still getting to know that side of her family, even as she, now the mother of a four-year-old, thinks of making another film about Inuit women in the North, and about the disappearance of traditional rituals.

“There are so many energies, I sometimes wonder, where do I go?” she says. “I was named after four different women. I used to think that was such a cool thing. But when you’re named after four different women, you sort of become those different woman. I thought it was such a cool thing, but it kind of messed me up.”

A fine mess, and a fine album too.

Elisapie Isaac performs at the Sleeman Centre in Guelph, Ont., on Feb. 6, and at Concorde Place in Vancouver on Feb. 13.