“Backwards World”, the first track of the compilation album From Then Until Almost Now by Mary Pastorius opens the gates into a finely wrought world of phantasmagoirc aural explorations, eerie atmospheres, and deeply personal emotional truths, with reserved, graceful aplomb, packing enough magic to erase the distinctions between the medium and the message.

Describing this album as a “collection of work I have done over the past 10 years in various incarnations including the bands Dope Fiend, Locura, and Queen Mary, as well as my solo material,” Pastorius then points out that this 2007 release also symoblised her “metaphorically ‘clearing house’ before moving onto ‘the next’”. But apart from serving a personal purpose, it is also a poignant artistic statement taking the listener on an excursion through a gallery of obsessions, vibes and fixations of the Western music scene from mid-Nineties to mid-Noughties. In this sense From Then Until Almost Now is not only a documentation of Mary’s own moods and states of mind between 1996 and 2005, but also a chronology of our collective recent past as seen through a prism of her vision.

And her vision interprets things in a curious fashion – at times magnifying small nuances and details to an almost extravagant degree, while often treating big things in broad, sweeping brush-strokes, thus creating a dreamlike world, which is at once meticulously constructed and eccentric, but at the same time completely accurate in its sincerity.

The record spans genres from futuristic dance-influenced and industrial tracks written in mid-Nineties, to retro songs tingled with shimmers of the ‘80s New Wave dating back to the early Noughties. But it’s Mary’s personal approach – which is totally convincing while remaining paradoxically non-linear – which holds the album together, putting its own stamp on each track regardless of the genre and emotional message it carries.

Asked how she manages to retain this strong sense of self irrespective of the stylistic ground he steps into, Mary laughs. “I really wish I had a fantastic answer to this question,” she says, “but this is really what comes out of me. I hear it in a certain way, so even the songs that are co-written with people, I am always writing the melody. So I hear what comes out of me. There is no formula, there is no calculation. This is how they come out.”

It is probably this connectedness to the inner self which makes her music instantly recognisable as Mary Pastorius music with its main elements always present: spare arrangements, compositional approach centred on the vocals, elegant vacuity juxtaposed with expressive intensity, richly detailed vocal phrasing, and emotionally complex states she goes deep into exploring. In fact, as deep as it is needed to pull real resonance from such an introverted approach to music as hers.

“I would call it a stream of consciousness,” Mary says when asked how much courage it takes to explore her emotions and feelings as thoroughly as she does. “I wouldn’t call it channelling, but it’s something like that. I don’t think about ‘baring my soul’ when I write my songs. I just do what the song requires me to do. And I don’t feel unsure or nervous what people would think about it. It is what it is. My lyrics are sometimes intense and emotional, but I really enjoy performing those songs live, and when I do, I am not emotionally distraught.”

This is probably because she is not interested in sentimentality or pathos, despite her instinctual gift for translating a sensation and realising a mood. Her ability to elaborate an emotion almost to excess, as well as to produce a deeply moving vocal delivery are kept in equilibrium with purely aesthetical considerations, and it is this understanding of the difference between art and life which makes her finely balanced act possible.

And when you hear her say that she never feels nervous about what people may think about her music, you realise that Mary Pastorius has managed to accomplish one of the hardest things one ever gets to do in music – to follow in the footsteps of a genius parent while at the same time following one’s own unique path. When asked how it feels to have one’s roots in a family of such overwhelming musical legacy and at the same time to break the mould by choosing one’s own way, Mary says that it has taken her a while to realise how the fact that she is Jaco Pastorius’s daughter has impacted on the fact that she didn’t start making music until relatively late.

“A lot of times you don’t realise that you have psychological baggage or issues until you get older,” she explains. “Dancing is a passion of mine as well, so when I was younger, I directed my creative energy into that, pursuing dancing and getting as close to music as you can possibly get without actually making it. And then at around 18 or 19 I realised what was holding me back: ‘My dad is Jaco Pastorius’. He was so amazing, such an obvious genius, that on the back of my mind I always thought, ‘Oh, well…’ But then one day everything just worked: I started to write songs. I was just writing, I didn’t really think about going out and performing any of that stuff. I had it in me, the music was there, it just had to come out.”

Only a few of us will ever know how much courage it has taken to do what she has decided to do at the time, for the simple fact that very few of us have genius fathers. The pressure of expectations both from the audience and oneself, high risk, high stakes, legend and myth - all of this Mary Pastorius has managed to set aside in order to do what needed to be done, to let the music come out and manifest itself, totally immersing the process and forgetting about non-creative considerations.

“I sit with a song and I can’t tell you where it comes from,” she says. “I hear it in my head or it comes to me like a wind, or a wave, it is what it is, although I might direct the process for the rest of the song to reveal itself. I just listen, and listen, and listen. You have to stay with it. The challenging part is the lyrics. Once I have the music, I have to match the feel and tone of the music, and I have to make it sit rhythmically with the melody. So that is quite challenging. And for that I need total privacy and I have to immerse myself in it. And it’s hard to do because I have a family and a busy life beyond music. But I have a backlog of material that nobody has seen yet, so I have to sit down and deal with writing more lyrics.”

She then reveals that she will be releasing new material this year, which will probably be done a track at a time. “It gets very involved to have do to do a whole project, a whole release,” she says. I may put out an EP, we’ll see. The new material will probably be dance-oriented, but you’ll still be able to tell that it’s a Mary Pastorius track, whatever that is that makes it me. But I feel dancier right now. I love drum and bass, stuff like that, so I’ll be looking into that.”

So From Then Until Almost Now presumably did the job of “cleaning the house”, moving her on to new things and new projects? “I feel that I am at a very good place right now,” Mary replies. “I feel very optimistic and I feel a momentum building right now. I guess like all artists I am always thinking about what I am going to do next, so I’m not really listening to any of the old stuff now, it’s like next, next. I am now working on new material, but at the same time I do live shows, so that kind of forced me to look at that material again because my new material wasn’t done yet. There was a period when I didn’t want to do any of those songs anymore, but now it’s pretty good. Those songs are still me, they are my melodies, and I’m actually enjoying performing them on stage.”

Seeing how Mary overcomes creative challenges, I wonder how she deals with issues of a different kind by asking how tough or easy it has been for her being a woman in such a male-dominated industry. “I have to honestly say that in my personal experience I have never felt disrespected or less then, or that people wouldn’t take me seriously,” she says. “That never happened. I think if you put yourself out there, there is going to be someone, and this goes for male musicians, whatever, when you put what’s uniquely you and comes out of you out there, there will be people who are going to respond to that. I am sure that there are women who have had very different experiences, so I am speaking for me personally. Maybe people have talked behind my back, I don’t know, but from interacting with male musicians my whole life I really have had nothing but respect.”

When I put it to her that people tend to take serious musicians seriously regardless of gender, Mary points out that she wouldn’t approach the issue in those terms. “I am not going to define what is a serious musician versus non-serious musician,” she says. “Everybody has their own definition of that. Someone can say, ‘I am not a serious musician because I’ve never studied,’ you know what I mean? So I can’t be a judge of what is serious and what is not. All I know that there is somebody for everything. I am just playing the music I love.”

But Mary Pastorius is so naturally a musician and so spontaneously intuitive that with her you immediately get the taste of a real thing – of the kind you always hear in those who engage in music for self-actualisation as opposed to pursuing non-creative ambitions.

The paradox is that by doing things in her own way without imitating or resembling anyone else, Mary Pastorius makes an almost mystical connection to the family history where different generations with different creative visions share an emphasis on personal creative freedom.

Her formal musical training may have been limited to piano lessons at the age of 9, but Mary Pastorius’s talent has achieved realisation of its purpose and its nature by following its own path, ending up producing art which is whole, complete and original. What she chose not to imitate she was able to find in herself.

And while her songs may transmit a wide array of moods and sensations from grey to the most intense, one thing they convince the listener of is that emotional truth can never be straightforward. “Sometimes I have songs that are not totally about me, and then other times those that are definitely about me,” Mary says. “And then there are songs which I thought weren’t about me, and a couple of years later I look at them and go, ‘Wow, that really was about me, I didn’t even realise that.’”