Americana singer-songwriter Gurf Morlix has been thinking a lot about his own mortality lately. It’s just kind of a part of his reality now as a 67-year-old man.

“Friends of mine have been dying and that’s not going to stop anytime soon,” Morlix tells me. “When you get to be 67, you’re thinking about these things.”

So it should be no surprise that his latest album, Impossible Blue, deals with death—a lot. It’s an intimate album that sounds as though his worn voice is gently singing in the same room as you. Even with a full band backing him, it has the same quiet emotional quality that you might get on a solo acoustic album.

Morlix is an experienced producer who’s worked with Lucinda Williams, Mary Gauthier and Slaid Cleaves, so he knows how to find the sound he wants. For this record, he set out to create a lot of space on the album and not fill in every gap with an instrument.

“I play small venues. I play to a hundred seats or less. So I am going for that intimacy,” Morlix says. “I’m not going to be playing an enormo-dome, so why would I want Bruce Springsteen drum echo in my music?”

One of the deaths that influenced Impossible Blue more than any other happened a decade ago, when a close friend took his own life. Morlix tried to write a song about it four different times, and it finally clicked, emerging as the album’s closing song, “The Backbeat of the Dispossessed.”

He knew the song was finished when he found himself able to memorialize his friend in a loving, tender and sympathetic way. That was a process.

“First, you’re sad, then you become angry. Then you kind of get over that and it turns into this really tragic thing that happened,” Morlix says.

A poignant line in that song, “I can’t imagine the impossible blue running deep inside of you,” inspired the album’s title. The “impossible blue,” he tells me, is the feeling of deep, deep sorrow that he can only imagine his friend felt and led him to take his own life.

“This guy had a teenage son when he checked out. I was thinking, ‘How sad can a human being be? How deep is that chasm?’ I can’t relate,” Morlix says. “I felt really bad in my life sometimes, but nothing close to that. I was just trying to imagine it.”

In spite of how hopeless the title sounds, the record is actually filled with hope and joy.

“The body count has been pretty high on some of my albums, and I don’t really have much say in that matter,” Morlix says. “You can’t just be dismal. No one wants or needs that. You got to offer something. You have to have hope somehow.”

Morlix recently suffered a heart attack, but he’s fully recovered and back on his feet. Now he feels like he’s living on borrowed time. You can hear the optimism on Impossible Blue, even as he talks about grim moments in his life.

“That was a monumental event. When you’re faced with mortality, you start embracing love a little bit more,” Morlix says. “Every day is really special to me. They put a stent in, and I’m good to go. I’m clear to eat all the triple baconators now, and I feel good.”

As a lifelong sideman, player and producer, he’s finally at a place where he’s writing and recording his own tunes—and people are actually excited to hear him play them.

“Some people peak early on, and they can’t seem to write a relevant song after that point,” Morlix says. “I feel like I’m still ramping it up here. It’s good to keep growing and improving.”

Gurf Morlix performs at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, at Michael’s On Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $15. 479-9777.

Last December, singer-songwriter Lauren Ruth Ward released a seven-song Doors cover EP called Happy Birthday Jim. She also made a video for each song. The whole thing was done in just seven weeks, a way to keep busy while her label waited for the right moment to release her new album.

“We did that out of sheer boredom. I was like, ‘I am dying, I need to put something out,” Ward says. “They’re being so precious about these songs and the plan. I want to respect it, but my fans are asking me when I’m going to put something out. It really drives me nuts.”

The cover EP was a collaborative project. She gave each of the seven songs to a different videographer, told them what the color scheme should be, and gave them each two weeks to make their videos. She didn’t even watch the videos until they were uploaded.

Despite having released the critically praised, fiercely queer art-rock record Well, Hell early in 2018 on Weekday, a subsidiary of Sony, putting together the Jim Morrison cover record on her own really excited her. There was a freedom to it that she really missed.

“They want you to work with names,” Ward says. “In L.A., if you’re working with somebody in their closet in Sherman Oaks, I understand it sounds sketchy, but I’m like, ‘It is a very creative human being.’”

The label let her make the Morrison cover record on her own, but they didn’t see eye to eye on her overall career trajectory. She was actually relieved in early January when she got the call that Weekday had folded, leaving her without a label.

“I’m super creative. I like to stay active,” Ward says. “That was such a problem. I didn’t foresee that. It would totally dampen who I am as a person, thus affecting my art.”

Since being label-free, she’s already released the highly energetic and self-empowering “Valhalla” as a video, as well as the audio for low-key and reflective “Pull String.” She’s got several more songs and videos in the works, and she can’t wait to get to them all out.

“I don’t really have a passion for an album. My thoughts don’t feel like they’re coming together as a chunk,” Ward says. “I’m just having a notion and writing about it, seeing a visual and creating it, and then releasing it as its own thing. That’s always been who I am.”

Originally from a small town in Maryland, she left her life as a hair stylist in 2015 and moved to L.A., where she entered the music scene full throttle. There she also felt a freedom to explore her sexuality. She’s now engaged to female singer-songwriter LP.

Ward is fiercely creative musically and visually. Getting signed to a label seemed like the opportunity she needed, but she found that she’s much better suited to being independent and having no one telling her what she can and can’t do. She still works as a hair stylist in L.A. In fact, in the four years she’s lived there, she’s been able to build up her client base enough that she can now fund her music videos herself, and pretty much express herself how she wants.

“I see visuals for every song. Sometimes I see the music videos before the songs are finished, or when it’s being written,” Ward says. “Before the label, I wanted a music video for everything, but I couldn’t afford it. Now after the label, I have a day job that I can use to fund projects.”

She’s had the unexpected offer this past year of joining a newly revived Divinyls. Through mutual friends, she met Divinyls guitarist Mark McEntee, who was blown away by her voice and energy, which reminded him of original singer Crissy Amphlett. They recorded a version of “I Touch Myself” with Ward and it was incredible. He booked a Divinyls tour in Australia earlier this year, but it got postponed due to some personal issues he was dealing with. She’s hoping it gets rescheduled soon.

“My generation does not know them at all. I’m excited to be a megaphone for my generation to be like, ‘This band was insane,’” Ward says. “Some of my friends were like, ‘I saw you post about going on the road with some Australian band. And I looked them up and holy shit, Crissy Amphlett, I lived my life not knowing who this person is.’ I was excited to put them on blast, because they deserve it.”

INFO: 9 p.m. Wednesday, April 24. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $12 adv/$15 door. 423-1338.