Haley Bonar lets the sun shine in

It's summertime, and Haley Bonar is coming out to play. After a long, cold winter, Midwesterners are reveling in the chance to finally frolic in the lilac-scented breeze of a warm summer day, and Bonar is joining in the celebration by unleashing the fourth and most vivid album of her career.

Bonar says the relaxation that comes with a warm summer day helps to fuel her creativity. "Honestly, I like to sit in the sun and just think and read and pass out for a while. I like to go take naps in the park a lot," she says, giggling and scrunching up her nose. "It's the best nap. It totally refreshes you. You wake up and you're like, Where am I? Oh, yeah, in the park!"

On a more serious note, she adds, "I just like the laziness of summertime. It allows people to be relaxed and do relaxing things. It's more conducive to writing."

Bonar's new album, Big Star, is in many ways a departure from the more melancholy music that has defined her career thus far, conjuring the hopeful feeling of a sunny day more often than the despair of a dark, cold night. Which isn't to say that Big Star is totally lacking in Bonar's signature haunting melodies and slow-burning electric guitar builds; rather, it seems she has become more comfortable alternating between light and dark, between confident proclamations and pensive unravelings. In short, Big Star is the work of a songwriter who is constantly evolving and becoming more comfortable with her own triumphs and hang-ups, coming to terms with the successes and setbacks of her own musical history.

Growing up in Rapid City, South Dakota, Bonar knew from a young age that she wanted to write songs. Fueled more by a desire to create her own music than to learn theory, Bonar struggled through piano lessons for a few years before giving up and asking her parents for a guitar. "That seemed like the most amicable vehicle, since I'm a songwriter," she explains. "It just made sense."

When she was 14, Bonar got her first guitar and learned a few basic chords from friends. She says she modeled herself after musicians like Ani DiFranco and Elliott Smith, "the people who were rocking out but still songwriters" at heart, and before long she had written enough of her own tunes to record an album. She began working the open-mic circuit in Rapid City and recorded her first album, Haley Bryn Bonar, in the attic of a farmhouse when she was 17. Introspective and sparse, Bonar's first album conveyed an emotional maturity beyond her years, driven by the isolation and loneliness of being an overtly creative girl wading through the public school system ("I've always been kind of a weird, weird girl," Bonar told a reporter in 2006). As a graduation present, her parents paid to have 1,000 copies of the album pressed, and shortly afterward she migrated to Duluth to find a larger audience and attend classes at the University of Minnesota's campus there.

Once in Duluth, Bonar quickly found her place in the city's flourishing music community. "Duluth is a weird place, and it's full of weird people, so there's lots of good art coming out of there," she remarks with a laugh. Bonar befriended fellow Duluth musicians Charlie Parr and Alan Sparhawk, who encouraged her to keep playing shows and making albums, and in 2003 Sparhawk released Bonar's second album, Size of Planets, on his Chairkicker's Union label. Over the next year she dropped out of school and began touring, filling the opening slot on a national Mason Jennings tour, and soon found herself the subject of much critical attention, both positive and negative.

"She was hearing from all sides, 'You gotta write some poppier stuff. Your music is beautiful, but you have to go a little bit closer to the center,'" says Chris Morrissey, Bonar's longtime bass player (and, until recently, her longtime boyfriend). But rather than listen to her critics, Bonar chose to wade even further into her own psyche and produce one of her most intensely personal albums, 2006's Lure the Fox. "And Lure the Fox makes Size of Planets look like a fluorescent light bulb, it's so dark," remarks Morrissey. "The subject matter in the music is incredibly dark, but it was, for her, a point in her career where she was rising above all of those things that were putting her in that dark spot."

"I have a weird side of me that kind of gets off on people putting down what I'm doing," Bonar says with a smirk. "It feeds my fire."