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There was a time when Michelle Shocked was declared part of a promising new breed of folksinger. Along with Suzanne Vega, Jane Siberry and Tracy Chapman, the Texas musician was one of a group of hip, contemporary singer-songwriters who were redefining the notion of folk music in the 1980s.

While Vega, Siberry and Chapman have continued – quietly but steadily – to write, record and perform, Shocked slipped off the radar.

After her excellent, rootsy Arkansas Traveler album, Shocked performed in Ottawa in 1992 as part of a memorable day of music that also included Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker, and the Neville Brothers. She released the stark, poignant disc, Kind Hearted Woman, in 1996.

Then there was nothing. Rumour had it that she’d got married and had a family (it was half-true: she’s been married for eight years but has no children).

Shocked has finally resurfaced. She’s on a three-week tour and will stop at the Canadian Tulip Festival tomorrow to headline an estrogen-heavy Mother’s Day bill that also includes Iris DeMent, Kelly Hogan and the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, and three Ottawa-area acts: R.J. McEwan and the Resurrected Jubilee United Choir, bluegrass band, Northern Sons, and singer-songwriter, Michaela Foster Marsh.

And it turns out she’s been writing, recording, and touring all along. Reached by cellphone in New York’s East Village, the lanky 38-year-old (born Michelle Johnston) patiently explains the details of a record company battle that drove her underground. It kept her from recording on any label for several years – not for another major label, not for an independent, not even for herself.

She says her former record company, Mercury/PolyGram (now included under the Universal umbrella) initially objected to what it called the “stylistic inconsistency” of her then-new songs (which became Kind Hearted Woman), then refused to promote the disc, then blocked her from recording anything else. Legal proceedings dragged on for nearly five years.

“I think they kind of knew in the course of a career that amount of time can really make or break it, but instead what I’ve been doing for the past five years is working what I call underground,” Shocked says, mentioning two hard-to-find projects she recorded during that time, Artists Make Lousy Slaves and Good News.

“Usually when people talk about being independent, they’re either recording for their own label or for an independent label that’s not distributed by one of the major-label distribution systems. In this case, it was neither of those. Technically, it was just treating the recordings as merchandise. I was selling them at shows like T-shirts or stickers or posters.”

Still, Shocked hasn’t stepped foot in Canada for at least three years, unwilling to tackle the red tape required for a working American musician to cross the border. What’s prompting her to include dates in Ottawa and Toronto this time is a desire to reconnect with as many fans as possible.

Shocked has had a flurry of creativity in the last few months, sparked by an invitation last fall to perform on New Year’s Eve at New York’s venerable folk club, the Bottom Line.

“I had to turn down the invitation because I didn’t have a band and I did not have any current material,” she says.

“Then I had the idea of calling a long-term collaborator of mine from Ireland named Fiachna Ó Braonáin (of Hothouse Flowers) and he invited me over to Dublin. That’s when we had this ambitious idea to write 30 songs in 30 days.”

They succeeded and accepted the gig, then flew to Los Angeles to assemble and rehearse a band. Shocked was delighted at the support she received. “For a New Year’s celebration in New York, it was one of the top five picks in the Village Voice,” she says.

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