If you have to suffer for your art, you might as well do it in style, right?

And where better to re-ignite that creative spark than in Paris, the City of Light?

For proof, look no further than Canadian songstress Sarah Slean, who moved base camp to Gay Paree in search of inspiration for her newly released fifth album The Baroness.

"It's the legacy of the art there, for me, the legacy of cherishing art," says Slean, 30, who spun a promotional tour in France into a seven-month sojourn. "I was way more inspired by all the art galleries and the fashion designers and the jewelry makers ...

"And it wasn't just the artistic influence, it was a life lesson. I learned a lot about myself by being lonely and not speaking the language."

Slean admits she journeyed "from somewhere dark to somewhere with hope" while overseas, noting the stay was prompted by existential anxieties over what it means to be alive. But she eventually came to the realization "you don't have to figure out how to be -- you just have to be," she says.

"The Baroness is a character that's been living in my mind for some time," says Slean, noting the musical alter ego also inspired her 2004 disc Day One. "The bigness and the brazenness and the audacity of that record, I attribute to The Baroness -- the guts you need for art-making."

But after assembling the track list for the new disc (written and recorded back home in Toronto), Slean realized none of the songs were particularly big, brazen, or audacious.

"I thought, 'Well, this is not that kind of music -- it's not grand at all,' " she continues. "Then I realized it's also barrenness, like barrenness -- the fragility and the nakedness and power of art-making unto itself."

A classical piano major who arranges all the string parts for her albums, Slean admits she found it tough to keep her more flowery influences in check while setting the largely confessional compositions to tape.

"That's why having a producer is so great," says Slean, who enlisted I Mother Earth founder Jagor Tanna to help in the studio. "He would trick me a lot of the time. I would have that instinct to put 12 more instruments on the thing, and he'd be like, "Just live on it for a week.' He kind of cajoled me into having the courage to leave it alone."

While she's happy to have had the time away, Slean -- last here in February singing Glenn Buhr solos at the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's New Music Festival -- says she couldn't have written the album anywhere but at home.

"Your mind has to be still to have a chance for the thing to appear to you," says Slean, who appears with fellow piano prodigy Royal Wood this Mother's Day at Burton Cummings Theatre. "When I was in Paris, it was just waves of inspiration and stimulus. But then when I came home and I was going to school and I got a place of my own, the dust settled and the flower-heads of these songs started to appear."