What would it sound like if your journal could sing?

What would transpire if each heartbreak took lyrical form, and every intimate confession was transformed into soaring notes, in a crescendo of self-discovery and an honesty that can only be revealed through time and a ready pen?

It might sound something like Claudia Combs Carty’s Phases.

“These songs are just deeply a part of me,” says the Barcelona-born, Boston-raised pianist and singer. “It feels very therapeutic to be releasing them finally. Just like everybody else, I’ve been through some rough times. But you always come out of things. I am stronger from them. I am thankful for all of it.”

The nine-track set, dropping October 22, 2021, is Carty’s first, and is so named because the bulk of it was written over the course of a decade. Each song marks a timeline of relationship dramas, highs and lows, including the upcoming single “Don’t Blame Me,” the first song Carty ever wrote more than 10 years ago. Having performed these songs for friends and family for years, she’s now releasing them for the rest of the world to nod in recognition with, to cry and sing along to.

It was always her dream to release an album, although the motivation and confidence to do so has “ebbed and flowed,” she says. But inspiration was constant, like, “This one guy I was with in my hometown, who ended up marrying some girl, and it felt like the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

She chuckles knowingly.

“It wasn’t.”

Those experiences have created a vulnerable showcase of piano and voice that is at once relatable and singular. Carty’s influences include songwriter Will Oldham, who performs as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and “sounds like he’s croaking, like his voice is breaking because there’s so much heart, so much passion in it.”

Others include Stevie Nicks, “who doesn’t sound like anyone else, and is herself through and through,” and the late Jeff Buckley; all of the artists who inspire her “sound so raw and real,” she explains. That makes sense – like those artists, Carty reveals her pain and uncertainty to produce something warm, sometimes uncomfortably relatable.

“Falling in love all of those times made me know what I want and really defined me,” says the songwriter, now 34. “I’m thankful for all of it. It’s wild that this album is coming out now, because, for the first time in my life, I’m in a very solid place. It’s amazing to see myself from a perspective I did not have at the time.”

Carty has been expressing herself musically since childhood, and had it not been for a fateful car trip, these songs may have been pounded out on the skins rather than rendered softly on the keys.

“My mom really wanted to be a musician,” she says. “I remember we were driving in the car, and she asked, ‘What instrument do you want to play?’ I thought about it and said, ‘I want to play the drums.’ But at that moment, I saw a truck drive by with a drawing of a piano on the side, and I said, ‘No, I want to play the piano.’”

Her family took that moment seriously, eventually naming the family dog Titan after the name of the piano moving company, and buying their 7-year-old daughter a piano, “even though we didn’t have a lot of money,” Carty says. “It’s the most incredible thing anyone has ever done for me.”

First came playing, and then singing, with classical compositions giving way to The Beatles and inspiring a passion for improvisation and expression. “My family always knew when something was happening with me, or when I was sad, because I’d be playing the piano,” Carty says.

Her decision to formalize that passion by studying at Boston’s storied Berklee College of Music ironically “kind of made me hate it,” Carty admits. “I get why it works for some people, but to put such structure on music, to have a right and a wrong way to do it, took the heart out of it for me.”

After what she calls “a recovery period,” she moved to New York, “to try to be in a band or something,” settling into a little apartment where her first songs were conceived. Even as she created these intricate pieces, Carty admits that she was lacking the confidence to see them through to recorded form, “even with encouragement from other people, who kept wanting to hear them.”

When a boyfriend bought her the equipment she needed to record the album herself, “I didn’t use it once. It was some blockage. I didn’t have love for myself,” she says. “It took me a while to start dedicating my life to myself, a lot of therapy, and a lot of self-reflection. And once I got there, I was like, ‘Let’s get this recorded.’”

Phases was recorded at Oakland, CA’s 25th Street Recording Studios. Carty’s sister, industry veteran Montserrat Carty, introduced her to a team that included producer Avi Vinocur, of the band Goodnight, Texas, whose songs have been heard in documentaries like “Tiger King” and “Free Solo,” and has a day job working with Metallica. During the session, which was supposed to have included five songs but ended with 10, Vinocur added guitar and vocal embellishments but also developed a deep connection to Carty and her work that made her comfortable with allowing someone else inside such a personal expression.

“He heard my music and believed in it, and I felt he understood me and my music in a unique way,” she says. “This album would not be anywhere as good without him. It’s terrifying when a collaborator doesn’t have the emotional attachment to it and says things like, ‘This word needs to change.’ But everything he suggested made sense. He’s a truly intelligent and talented musician.”

It took a decade for the songs on Phases to be recorded, and another year for the world to hear them when Covid-19 delayed the release. “At first, I was like, ‘Get this out as soon as possible,’” Carty says. “But this gave me some time to really think about the way I wanted to release it.”

Although the album doesn’t come out until the fall, Carty released her first two singles, the set-opening “Silent Whispers” and “All That,” earlier this year. “Silent Whispers,” she explains, “is about anxiety. When I wrote that song, I was panicking, and I thought, ‘I’ll play piano.’ I literally made it up then, the words were coming out of my mouth, and I was like, ‘What is that?’ I didn’t know I felt these things.”

“All That” was inspired by the end of a long relationship with someone Carty really loved. “But he was not right for me,” she says. “It’s about trying to move on, when the person really is still with you in a lot of ways, whether you like it or not.”

“Don’t Blame Me,” her first song ever, is Carty’s favorite. “It is so fundamentally me,” she says. “Everyone who knows me has heard that song at some point, and it’s a classic, at least in my life. It’s kind of funny, when you say, ‘Don’t blame me,’ when it kind of is your fault.”

Listening to these songs now has given Carty a sense of grace and understanding for the woman she was when she wrote them. “I feel sympathy for all of these deep emotions now, because I have this clarity to it.” And though they are inspired by her own story, these songs are resonant with others who hear them.

“It’s happened a few times that people I’ve never met have reached out to me and said, ‘That song means so much to me,’” she says. “Nothing feels as good as when somebody says, ‘I love that song.’ It’s the best feeling in the world.”

Written by Leslie Streeter