Women's music legend and out singer/songwriter Ferron has returned triumphantly with Turning into Beautiful, her first album of original material in several years. Anyone familiar with both her distinctive vocals, her unique guitar style and her gift for writing enduring songs will most certainly appreciate these nine songs. Even better is the potential for a whole new generation to come under the spell of this influential and brilliant artist.

AfterEllen.com: I was listening to some CDs by LGBT hip-hop artists before speaking with you and it made me wonder if you have ever been asked permission to use any of your songs as samples in another artist's hip-hop track?
Ferron: No, I've never been asked.

AE: If you were asked, is it something you would agree to do?
F: Oh, I think so. It's sort of a compliment, I guess.

AE: Yes, in a strange way it is a compliment. Your new album Turning into Beautiful opens with the song “More Than That,” in which you sing “Hello my friends, I feel so happy to be back/To feel so clear and on the track” – can you elaborate on that sentiment?
F: Well, it took a long time to get the next CD out. I have a lot of thinking and sorting out to do. To finally be able to get it flowing and to realize, once again, that I maybe had something to talk about was really thrilling. A couple of things happened in between albums. I lost a couple of people. I thought maybe I wouldn't do music anymore. It was just a whole bunch of things. I'm really not a fast writer. I've always sort of had to test out my feelings because, primarily, whatever's going on, what I'm going to write about, is really about making stepping stones that I can live with. So, it takes a long time. I, maybe when I was younger, didn't have an audience in mind. And then for a while there was an audience that was so constant that it was hard to even tell how I felt. Then, it calmed down again to where I could shut that out and could write from an inner place.

AE: Are you saying that you felt that there was a period there where you were writing more for an audience than for yourself?
F: I think when I wrote Phantom Center, say in 1990, I had had some realizations about how I could have peace in my life, and how I could live in a particular way that helped me to feel good all the time. Well, most of the time. Before then there was a lot of stuff that I hadn't worked through. When I was writing that CD I would have thought that it was, hopefully, helpful for someone else. So I would have been aware of them in that way. Driver was sort of like the end of the cone; the pointed end. I got to this place where it was really just me in my life, whether I could be happy or not; be fulfilled. By the time I wrote Driver, which ended up getting a lot of accolades, it was interesting. It was an album that was just for me, and was also this attempt at the fourth dimension in that, could you create an album that was as peaceful in the music and created the space of peace as well as talking about it?

AE: It's interesting it turned out that way: an album that was perhaps your most personal would be the one that was so well-received. You mention that there were people you lost in between Still Riot and Turning into Beautiful. That's a nine year stretch between albums of original Ferron material. What would you say is personally the biggest difference between the Ferron of 1996 and 2005?
F: I was in the studio with Warner Brothers and they let me produce Still Riot on my own. It was ironic that in the end there was nothing there for the radio. They had really hoped for that. All along there was always somebody there from the record company in the studio. Ted Templeman said that Still Riot was a near-perfect CD.

So everybody went ahead on that. My mixer and my engineer and producer and Ted Templeman and I all had a conversation on the phone. The only thing that he had wanted to do was change the order of two songs. We had a talk about that, and I said it didn't make sense to me because of the larger picture that I had in mind. He said, “You seem to be a woman who knows yourself,” and that it was a near-perfect CD.

So we brought it out, and within minutes I had hung myself, because they said there was nothing for the radio; they didn't want to do anything. It was kind of over. I was kind of amazed at how pleased I was with Ted Templeman's approval. I think that was the end of looking for approval. It devastated me that I had hung so much on that deal. Other CDs of my past were involved in it. It was hard to have taken the hook and then choked on it.

I’ve gotten letters and people have come up to me, and I know there are girls out there who are struggling with some of the same issues that I struggled with or am still struggling with. So to know that it can help them, or to just be the support that they need, it’s sort of an easy thing for me to do. So it’s nice to be able to do that.