At the Bartlett: Sallie Ford uses her indie-rock music to face her demons

With three albums under her belt and a solid fan base in her adopted hometown of Portland and beyond, indie-rock singer Sallie Ford, who originally hails from Asheville, North Carolina, had every reason to be confident about her future.

But a band breakup (Sallie Ford and the Sound Outside), a new musical venture that put her voice front and center (2014’s “Slap Back”) and a year off from playing music made Ford doubt herself as a musician. Plus, anxiety, insecurity and depression, which Ford has dealt with throughout her life, reared their ugly heads.

Rather than bury those issues even deeper, Ford chose to confront them head on, first through therapy, then through her confessional fourth album, “Soul Sick,” which brings her to the Bartlett on Wednesday.

“Writing the record was healing in a lot of ways,” Ford said. “It was therapeutic to do that and speak about those things.”

On the blues-rock-fueled “Soul Sick,” which was recorded at Portland’s Type Foundry studio and produced by Mike Coykendall (M. Ward, She & Him), Ford acts as both client and therapist.

Album opener “Record on Repeat” finds Ford singing about the negative thoughts she sometimes has (“Screw it/I’m a grump/Screw it/Maybe I should give up … /Maybe there’s something very wrong with me.”).

On the ’60s-inspired “Screw Up,” Ford sings about, well, screwing up, and “Get Out” details insecurities Ford feels about herself on and off stage.

But on songs like “Loneliness is Power” and “Never Gonna Please,” Ford switches gears and assures herself, and the listener, that yes, there is power in being OK with being alone and accepting that you can’t always please everyone.

“A lot of the times I’ve dealt with people saying critical things about my music in particular or it could be whatever, my appearance,” she said about “Never Gonna Please.” “That song is trying to feel empowered and feel like I don’t need to care what other people think about me.

“No one can always live by those completely but writing a song certainly as a mantra to yourself can try to change your mind into trying to think healthy patterns like that,” she continues. “Thinking negative things is going to make a negative spiral around you anyway.”

Learning about the power of positive thinking via Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling self-help book “The Secret,” which was based on a movie of the same name – Ford calls the film “really cheesy” – is what inspired Ford to focus on writing songs and to pursue a career as a musician in the first place. So it makes sense that it’s what brought her back to the art after a period away.

“This album is also talking about the thoughts in my head and how some of them are negative and some of them are positive and trying to be more of a positive person,” she said.

Spoken like a true therapy success story.