A move that was only natural

CANADA’S rugged and rocky Bruce Trail is reputed to have inflicted more blisters and aching feet than any other hiking path in North America, but for Sarah Harmer the physical challenge of the hike was secondary to its symbolism. The 35-year-old singer-songwriter used it to prepare for the recording of her third and most recent solo album, “I’m a Mountain,” which is themed around a threatened portion of the land upon which the trail sits.

“I spend so much time driving and going to shows and being in a van and not seeing enough details in those places, and I thought, I can do a walking tour on the Niagara Escarpment,” said Harmer, who spent two weeks last summer hiking a portion of the Escarpment’s 480-mile Bruce Trail with her band, performing the folk and bluegrass songs that would eventually become “I’m a Mountain.”

All the tracks on the album flow from the issue set forth, with slow banjo accompaniment, on “Escarpment Blues.” Topped with Harmer’s warm warble, the song tells the true story of a quarry’s recent bid to expand its operations into Escarpment farmlands -- farms that border the land Harmer grew up on and on which her parents still live.

Other songs on the album include the piano-dappled “Oleander,” on which her father sings backup, and “Salamandre,” a children’s folk song Harmer sings Edith Piaf style -- in French. Penned by friends, the latter song was shared with Harmer around the same time she was involved in research to show that the land the quarry is seeking is also the habitat of the federally endangered Jefferson salamander.

To Harmer’s credit, none of the songs on “I’m a Mountain” comes across as a self-righteous call to action. They are folk in the truest and best sense: stories that voice the concerns of those with little socioeconomic clout told in songs with simple, acoustic instrumentation.

Harmer’s 2000 solo debut, “You Were Here” (a country-folk album Time magazine dubbed “debut of the year”) and her 2005 Juno Award-winning follow-up, “All of Our Names,” featured an occasional stripped-down number, whereas “I’m a Mountain” is Harmer’s first all-acoustic record. The overall sound was influenced not only by the album’s theme, she said, but also by the many bluegrass musicians Harmer had as house guests over the last couple of years in her home just outside of Kingston, a port town two hours east of Toronto.

“My songwriting has always been done on acoustic or electric guitar, but I’ve been influenced definitely in the last few years by different bands that have come through,” she said, citing the “virtuosic fast playing” of Canadian acts Heartbreak Hill and Crazy Strings.

HARMER’S softer, acoustic sound is, arguably, a direction she’s been moving in ever since she joined her first band. She was 17 at the time, living at home with her parents in the small farm town of Burlington, Ontario, when the clerk at the local record store invited her to play guitar with his country rock group, the Saddle Tramps.

Relocating to Kingston to attend Queens University, she started her own band at age 22, playing guitar and stepping into the lead singer position with Weeping Tile, playing “scrappy stuff” with electric guitars and drums and bass in songs that were informed by the college bands she liked at the time: the Breeders and the Replacements.

That musical history is most apparent in her early solo work. “You Were Here,” an album that garnered commercial radio airplay and platinum sales in Canada, was easy-on-the-ears, country-fried pop with all the roots-rock trimmings. Much of the music bears traces of Weeping Tile, and for good reason. Many of the songs were written while Harmer was with the band.

But in the late ‘90s, when the personal dynamics of that group were “getting a bit rough,” she said, she took a bunch of songs she’d been “keeping in her back pocket” and struck out on her own.

She never wanted to be a solo act.

“I loved bands,” she said. “I was such a fan of R.E.M. and bands and the democracy of that.”

But the writing was on the wall. She disbanded Weeping Tile and shortly thereafter went on tour, playing acoustic guitar onstage by herself in a string of house concerts and little gigs across Canada booked with two other female musicians.

Harmer’s vocals seem better suited to her solo work.

Warm and comforting as a country quilt, they’ve grown sweeter and more refined with each album.

“People are responding to the simplicity and the approachable quality of this record,” Harmer said.

“I made it for myself,” she added. “But when it has the effect of helping someone else or being something that someone else likes, it’s really satisfying.”

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Sarah Harmer

Where: The Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Price: $20

Info: (323) 463-0204 or www.knittingfactory.com