With Goodnight Nobody, Canada's favourite bookish sweetheart says goodbye to Montreal (the city where she came to musical maturity with 1999's brilliant Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars, and the English/French matching set of Desmorais and Heart and Crime) and sets out to return to Eastern Canada, where she was born and came of age. She's a happily married indie-rock figure who unashamedly exposes her motherly instincts and marital insecurities so that we may get to know her better and invest ourselves in her artistic pursuits. She's an open book in a music world where calculated cool equals anonymity and aloofness. She writes songs about her life, which just happens to be our lives. And just maybe everyone is listening.

"Snowfalls In November" is quintessential Doiron and a beautiful opener for the album, setting the overall tone with its autobiographical themes and establishing how it will depart musically from her other work -- specifically by way of first-time backing-band Herman Dune, Doiron's regular touring partners in Europe and gifted songwriters in their own right. With a loose sound that only occasionally moves from a whimper to a growl, Herman Dune's guitar/bass/drums arrangement perfectly translates the occasionally complex melodies that Doiron plucks out on her guitar. The lyric "Kids walking in snowpants" tugs at my heart and brings on a rush of nostalgia, making me with that August's humidity would burn itself away so Montreal could bury me with snow before inviting me to race up and down the hills at Parc La Fontaine. The refrain "We don't go nowhere / Not today, not tonight / Won't tie up my hair / Won't get dressed too / I'll just stay here next to you / We don't go nowhere / Let the baby sleep / Let the dogs rest too" communicates the romantic air that surrounds those wintery Canadian days and weeks where setting foot outdoors is not an alternative to staying bundled up with the warmth of a lover. And this is the real beauty in Doiron's songs, this way of speaking so personally while still inviting and encouraging the intimate reflections of the listener.

"Last Night" is a sad farewell to Doiron's children and husband before departing on a twenty date tour that keeps her away from home and longing for their company. She sings "I will close my eyes in front of all the people / I will close my eyes / Thinking of you" while a dreamily lazy backbeat bounces the song back toward the open arms of the ones she left behind. "Tonight Is No Night" is a lovely acoustic ballad, one of three tracks recorded with Dave Draves at his Little Bullhorn studio in Ottawa (all positioned at the middle of the running order). Like the other songs featuring Draves as a backing musician, there is an atmospheric quality to the compositions that is accented by string samples, piano and vibes. The last of this triptych, "Dance All Night", has an odd Cat Power quality that is almost (but not quite) at odds with the persona Doiron cultivates on disc and on stage, but it is fitting that this quality comes across on Goodnight Nobody, as it seems that Doiron finally has a grip on the awkwardness that once defined her.

"The Songwriter" features a drifting solo guitar melody wonderfully juxtaposed by a chugging electric guitar rhythm; it's played entirely on the bass strings, and twice takes on a sort of Crazy Horse posture with the lead guitar doing a marvelous Neil Young cum Mark Kozelek freak-out. In contrast, the aptly titled "Banjo" is a low-key recording of Doiron alone with only a banjo as accompaniment. With its questions of self-confidence and (perhaps) a flash of lost-love reuniting, it's only appropriate that this track was recorded at the Toronto apartment of Doiron's former Eric's Trip collaborator, Rick White. With the sound of the Queen Street streetcar rolling past outside the window, the sense of home and personal history that is so prevalent in songs dealing with Doiron's domestic life finds a voice in this fleeting moment, captured six hundred kilometers from her family and less than a year before she would move back to a place she had long called home.