Megan Hamilton’s voice is what trips people up. It’s not that her singing is harsh, tuneless or even terribly idiosyncratic — quite the contrary. The Torontonian singer-songwriter is possessed of a rich, resonant set of pipes. Her vocals are husky and malleable, a smoky, wood-fired alto with lovely undertones of rust, tequila and threadbare flannel. Depending on the song, Hamilton can muster anything from the elastic-band hiccup of Joanna Newsom to the sun-soaked drawl of Lucinda Williams, and that may be where the confusion lies.

With its weathered qualities, Hamilton’s voice is suited to folksy, rootsy arrangements. Listen to the opening drum-roll and the first few notes of “Cat Tail Legs,” a mournful shuffle from her new album, See Your Midnight Breath in the Shipyard (Familiar), and you might assume you’re listening to the latest in a long line of alt.country spitfires, a worthy inheritor of Kathleen Edwards’ twangy throne.

But once you make it past the intro and settle into the groove of the song, the creaks and echoes and nifty nooks and crannies in its arrangement, it’s clear that Hamilton’s working with a different sonic framework. “Cat Tail Legs” cracks open with a swaggering squall of saloon piano and snarled electric guitar; Hamilton sounds more like Stevie Nicks than any high lonesome cowgirl amidst the maelstrom. Elsewhere, vocal reverb adds overlapping ghostly moans beneath the winsome madrigal of “From Here To Vancouver.”

Hamilton is more likely to obsess over the textured sonic tapestry of Panda Bear’s Person Pitch or the specific guitar tones on Big Star’s Sister Lovers than any straightforward singer-songwriter fare.

“I know I’ve got people who like folk and roots music at my live shows, and I know I started a label that seems to be putting out folk and roots music, but I’ve never been a folkie,” she states, cheerfully but firmly. “I love sounds and I love textures and I love production that’s subtle and intricate and enhances the songs. It just took me a while before I was able to translate that within my own work. I’ve only been doing this for about five years, and I had to figure out how to get to the sound that I really wanted. Mark has always been really helpful with that.”

That would be Mark Vogelsang, the award-winning sound designer and producer-engineer who has as much to do with the captivating complexity of SYMBitS as Hamilton herself. The two have been working together for years; Hamilton claims they share a similar reverence for the process of recording and have an intimate understanding of each other’s moods. (“Sometimes I cry in the middle of recording because I get so emotional,” she laughs, “and he doesn’t freak out. You can’t ask for much more than that.”)

On SYMBitS, Vogelsang helped Hamilton translate the spark of an idea — a nostalgic and formative memory from childhood — into a complicated but awesome concept. Originally, the singer-songwriter had hoped to make an ambitious concept album, for which she’d planned to hole up at her dad’s farm in the country for three months with a guitar for company and write a story-based record from start to finish. Grant funding didn’t co-operate, so Hamilton consulted with her inner child to come up with what seemed like a more manageable plan.

 “I kept remembering the first time I was at camp when I was a kid,” she begins. “My camp was right down the road from the cabin where Tom Thomson was found. Pretty neat, huh? So anyhow, I was 10, and it was the first time I’d been to a dance. We were all on this docked boat, and a boy — actually, it was Pierre Trudeau’s son — asked me to dance. Afterward, I remember having this feeling. It was a very clear night, quite chilly. It was dark and late at night, and I remember sitting by myself at the dock, holding my knees and feeling just so overwhelmed and full. Ever since then, when I’m in a marina at night, I get that sense. It’s the sound of the ropes against the masts, the waves against the dock. I can’t quite describe it.”

What she couldn’t put into words, Vogelsang tried to achieve with sound. Ships and oceans and nautical imagery surfaced as some of the prominent themes in the collection of songs Hamilton hoped to record. The sound designer ran with the idea of a ship and channelled the pair’s shared love of reverb into a crazy challenge: to record and mix the album as though it had been created within a ship. This required him to figure out what the drums would sound like on deck if someone was whacking at a kit down in the boiler room, or what effect waves might have on vocals echoing out over an open body of water.

On Hamilton’s website, you can view a charming musical trailer that features both stop-motion vignettes and Vogelsang’s batshit-nuts conceptual diagram of his sonic set-up, which resembles a rogue storyboard from The Life Aquatic that’s covered in crazy annotated equations and descriptions. And, as Hamilton explains, the ship may even have saved her from descending into an imaginary world of cocaine and misery.

“We knew we really wanted to do it in the ’70s, production-wise, and we thought that Fleetwood Mac and Big Star had made albums that had similar emotional themes and elicited similar responses. If I hadn’t recognized that particular feeling,” she laughs, “then maybe it would have ended up sounding like Rumours.”

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