“Can’t keep down a girl who loves music,” sings Liz Powell on “Got a Call” from Land of Talk’s upcoming full-length Some Are Lakes. It’s the perfect mantra for the band’s founding frontwoman, since the three years of Land of Talk’s existence have been a veritable minefield of lineup changes, exhaustive touring, scrapped recordings, a sprained ankle and, as was just announced before EYE went to press, a voice-related illness that will force her to cancel her gigs through the end of September, including this Saturday's Lee's Palace gig. I spoke with her last week, when her voice wasn’t yet her main worry.

“Sorry, I’m hobbling around,” Powell apologizes when she answers the phone from her soundman’s patio in Montreal. She recounts the injury with a charming and unselfconscious enthusiasm. “I sprained it on the second song into the New York set,” she says in her distinctively brittle voice, “and I guess the adrenaline was so high that I felt like maybe I’d just messed it up a bit. But five hours later, on the drive back to Montreal, I realized it was probably a bit more than a little twist.”

Thanks to the ankle, Powell had been playing recent shows sitting down, and claimed to be enjoying it — rocking out on a swivel stool so she can flail around during guitar solos. Her tenacity is symbolic of Land of Talk’s storyline thus far, where struggle often leads to a fairy-tale ending.

As far as fairy tales go, the title of this piece could easily be a splashy exercise in name-dropping: “Liz Powell signs to Saddle Creek in the US, joins Broken Social Scene, records at the Arcade Fire’s studio, works with Bon Iver and, oh yeah, releases a new Land of Talk record.” As we discuss her music, my conversation with Powell consistently digresses into chats about her Broken Social induction, her mom’s election campaign (Valerie Powell is the Green Party candidate for Simcoe North), recording Some Are Lakes at the Arcade Fire’s converted-church studio outside Montreal and the fact that these extra-musical connections inevitably dominate articles about Land of Talk.

Headlines aside, it’s worth noting that Powell has known Broken Social Scenesters Brendan Canning and Leslie Feist since the pair were members of By Divine Right in the late ’90s. But after working with BSS on the soundtrack to The Tracey Fragments as well as Canning’s new album, Powell suggested possibly touring together in an email. Evidently, she ended up with a little more than she bargained for. According to Powell: “At Osheaga, I was backstage visiting them and a bunch of the guys were, like, ‘Hey Powell, we hear that you’re playing guitar with us.’ And I was, like, ‘Ahh, yes definitely.’ So somewhere along there I joined Broken Social Scene.”

In the meantime, Powell has her own band to worry about. And, as history illustrates, Land of Talk aren’t always so fortuitous. Touring for three years behind their 2005 EP Applause Cheer Boo Hiss which was given a staggered international release (in Canada, the US, UK and Australia), Land of Talk lost drummer Bucky Wheaton, a key member of the band, to tour-related burnout. Consequently, they scrapped all the original recordings for Some Are Lakes.

“It was just mainly for sentimentality’s sake; or lack [of],” says Powell of the difficult decision to start over. “It was already hard enough for me when he left the band to be playing the older songs without him, and to be touring without him, that I don’t think I could bear him being on another record that he wasn’t going to be playing [live].”

Compared to the one-sided aggression of the originals — three of the tracks were appended to the UK version of Applause Cheer Boo Hiss — Some Are Lakes is a deep and varied collection. Powell’s guitar-playing retains its Sonic Youth–sounding savagery on tracks like “Corner Phone” while the super-solid rhythm section of bassist Chris McCarron and drummer Andrew Barr shine on “Yuppy Flu” and “The Man Who Breaks Things.” But slow-burners like “Got a Call” and “Young Bridge” mix the familiar intensity of Applause Cheer Boo Hiss with warmer textures and a mature sense of space.

Powell attributes the refreshed approach to hooking up with Justin Vernon, a.k.a. Bon Iver, when, soon after Bucky’s departure, Land of Talk and The Rosebuds (with whom Vernon was collaborating) toured together. “Ever since I heard the rough mixes of [Bon Iver’s] For Emma, Forever Ago,” she says, “we definitely latched on to Justin and said, ‘You have to participate in the re-recording of the album in some capacity — to breathe new life into it or to help shape it.’ And it ended up with him producing it, mixing it and taking utmost care of each of these songs, which I had sort of lost faith in.

“For lack of a better saying, it was a blessing in disguise that all these bad things happened and it seems that better things took their place,” she adds. “In a way it was a good lesson for me to sort of keep your head up even when you feel like you’re going through slaughter; you come out the other end better for it.”

Powell may need that mantra yet, or possibly a fairy godmother, to set things right.

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