"If you have the entire universe to talk about, it can be overwhelming," Laura Veirs says. "So it's nice to have something to pare it down a little bit." It must be easy to get overwhelmed when you're moved to sing about the galaxies in a stream of tears. But stifle your cynicism: Year of Meteors, Veirs' fifth album, teems with life.

Growing up in Colorado, she had little use for country radio or her father's collection of folk records, and piano lessons never captured her attention the way nature did. "I love it. And I'm awed by it and I fear it and I'm a part of it," the 32-year-old singer-guitarist-keyboardist says on the phone from Seattle, a few weeks before leaving for her first solo tour. "My parents instilled in us a real appreciation of the natural world from the very beginning. I just try to observe it and see it and take it in and be influenced by it, you know, wherever it is. If it's the light coming through a window or a tree budding outside or a torrential downpour, I'm affected by it and I like it." She didn't discover music's pleasures until she left home to study geology at Carleton College. There her classmates turned her on to a different kind of rock. (Yeah, I said it.)

"Even though I was in Minnesota, they showed me a lot about the underground scenes in the Pacific Northwest," she says. Inspired by Bikini Kill and other riot grrrls, Veirs started a punk band; later, while translating for geologists on a trip to the Chinese desert, she killed her boredom with an acoustic guitar. Eventually, she found herself tracing the roots of American music. Once she moved to Seattle in 1997, she delved into folk and country blues.

At first, she struggled to find her voice. After a self-titled album that she seldom revisits, Veirs tried on a ramblin' gal persona for 2001's The Triumphs and Travails of Orphan Mae. "Jailhouse Fire" and "John Henry Lives" show off her finger-picking skills, but they have little of the sensuality that distinguishes her later songs. Once she strayed from the narrow roads that straightforward folk and punk had promised, nature took hold of her lyrics. "Ohio Clouds," from 2003's Troubled by the Fire, is an awkward stab at specificity; by the following year, Veirs' songwriting made a great leap with Carbon Glacier's 13 sonic synonyms for ice and snow. "I don't consider myself a poet, but I've always written in journals and written lots of stream-of-consciousness kinds of writing," she says.

Year of Meteors (Nonesuch) is her lushest work to date. Sun saturates its songs, bringing sailors, mermaids and skinny-dippers to the surface. Her words rush over spacey riffs and tropical keys that take all the time they need. There's a world of longing in "Galaxies" and "Rialto," sweet vulnerability in "Parisian Dream" and "Spelunking." The viola-driven "Black Gold Blues" draws on her punk roots, but the overall mood is woozy. If everyone got lucky every time she heralds gravity's death, we'd all be a lot less tense.

Since Orphan Mae, she's played with The Tortured Souls: Seattle stalwarts Tucker Martine (drums) and Steve Moore (piano), and K Records constant Karl Blau (bass/guitar/keys). Veirs plans to get back with her band in a few weeks for dates in Europe, where she's been most successful, but on this tour—opening for The Decemberists' Colin Meloy—she's on her own. She's been figuring out how to play bigger venues with fewer instruments. "I have a looping pedal, so I can use that for a few of the songs," she says. "I don't like to overdo it, because I think sometimes people get distracted by their pedals and it kind of takes away from the essence of the song."

Veirs has the rest of the year mapped out: A few short tours with the band, then back to Martine's studio to record her latest batch of songs. After that? Her plans are filled with land she's seen before and the possibility of exploring new territory. "I would love to go back to Greece. I went and played there once and it was so fun. I would love to go to Croatia and the Eastern bloc countries. I'd love to play in Russia. I'd love to play in China. I'd love to go to Brazil, Argentina. I mean, it would be so fun to play in countries that are a little more different. England's great and all, but it's like our homeland and it's not that different in a way."

Veirs may not have a whole universe to explore, but she's set her sights on a big chunk of it. Still, she doesn't plan to let geography completely dictate her sound. "You'll hear little references to places in a title or in a lyric here and there," she says. "But it's not like I went to Paris and became obsessed with a French band and, like, had to play with them or something, you know. It hasn't gotten that far yet."

Fri., Jan. 27, 8 p.m., $16, with Colin Meloy, The TLA, 334 South St., 215-922-1011, www.thetla.com.