When I gave the singer-songwriter Abbey Blackwell a call the other morning, she was in the middle of doing her taxes in her Fremont studio — an unglamorous, detail-oriented task she cracked might not be quite as fun as making music but “maybe equally as eye-opening.”

Everett-bred Blackwell is also in the middle of a transitional moment in her music career more broadly. She recently left the popular Canadian band Alvvays after spending about three years as its bassist, and, earlier this month, released Big Big Motion, the livelier follow-up to her comparatively spare solo album from last year, My Maze. She cites Linda Perhacs, Sibylle Baier, and Arthur Russell as especially influential on a sound she described, after a spell of self-deprecating deliberation, as “jazz-influenced pop music, basically.”

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