Healing brings new energy to Votolato’s sound

It was late 2012, and Rocky Votolato had hit a creative roadblock. The Seattle-based singer-songwriter had just released an independently produced, crowd-funded album called “Television Saints,” and when he sat down to write new music, his pen seemed to have run dry.

“It was a pretty big crisis for me, mentally and emotionally and spiritually,” Votolato said. “I was in a very tough, dark place.”

Votolato had been writing almost constantly since he was a teenager, so this musical drought, coupled with a severe bout of depression, led him to contemplate quitting music altogether.

“I was just considering, if it wasn’t working organically, maybe I’ll just stop doing it, have more of a quote-unquote normal life,” he said.

So he took a two-year break. He focused on his family. He focused on his mental health. He didn’t write a note.

And then last year, like a switch flipping on, it all came back to him.

“It was like floodgates opening,” Votolato said. “I wrote, like, 30 songs in a three-month period. I was writing all day and staying up all night writing. … It’s very cathartic and healing, and I’ve always used it to be able to make sense of life.”

Those songs led to Votolato’s newest album, “Hospital Handshakes,” which is the most upbeat album he’s released in some time. Because “Television Saints” and its predecessor “True Devotion” consisted entirely of brooding balladry, it’s almost disarming to hear the handful of up-tempo rock songs on “Handshakes.”

“It’s got a different kind of energy,” Votolato said of the record, “a new lifeblood flowing through it.”

Votolato’s lyrics are still moody and introspective, but they’re shot through with a newfound optimism, and the album itself is a sobering document of the calm following a particularly tumultuous storm. On the album opener “Boxcutter,” Votolato sings, “I’m finally resurrected … When the fall you thought would kill you / Sets you free instead.” And on the album’s title track, he opines that “We must each be broken / If we’re ever to be made new again.”

“It keeps coming back to healing and overcoming depression and dark thoughts in general,” he said. “There’s that madness that’s very present in the music, but there’s also hope and light coming through it, and healing. That’s what the record means to me. … It’s kind of like a rebirth, I guess you could say, getting back to the point of why I make music.”

Following a European tour, Votolato is back in the States, and he drops in at the Bartlett on Thursday night. He’s been a fixture of the Spokane scene for years – he was here last summer – and Votolato says he’s developed a personal connection with the city and many of its musicians.

“It’s always been one of the places where I’ve tried to cultivate a following and keep it on the tour routing,” he said. “I think it’s a cool place, and the shows I’ve done there have always been really inspiring.”

Votolato will be playing without a backing band on this tour – Thursday’s show will feature only him and his guitar – but he says performing solo shifts the focus from how a song is being played to what meaning that song is trying to convey.

“The album is about the songs, and I can still communicate that very well with just a guitar, because that’s how the songs were written,” he said. “There’s a real intimate freedom that comes from playing the songs solo. It becomes more ethereal.”

And it feels good, Votolato says, to be back in the swing of things and to be back onstage. It’s a natural fit for him.

“Music is what I feel like I was born to do,” he said. “On whatever level that is – whether it’s playing to a hundred people or a thousand people every night. It really doesn’t matter to me.”