Sooner or later, every songwriter seems to make an album about loss and heavy personal changes. But they’re seldom as beautiful as the one Mary Timony just did.

Timony is a longtime treasure of the indie rock world, fronting the Boston band Helium in the ‘90s and then moving on to the bands Wild Flag and Ex Hex. But she was in a more introspective mood when she wrote the songs for “Untame the Tiger,” which became her first official solo album in 19 years. She’ll be playing that music, plus a few Helium nuggets, at the Crystal Ballroom on Saturday.

“It came about at a pretty hard time,” she said this week. “Both of my parents were sick when the pandemic was going on and I was taking care of them (Both have since passed away). And my partner of 12 years left suddenly. So everything changed and my life was crazy and stressful; the music gave me something to focus on and really helped me through that time. The primary reason I do art is that it’s self-soothing; that and connecting with people are the main reasons to do it.”

Though her lyrics have usually been personal, you couldn’t always tell. “It was hard this time because I actually had to get vulnerable. The songs have always been about my emotions but I came up with a lot of ways to hide, using a lot of metaphors. And I still have that tendency to hide, but as I get older I challenge myself to be more brave with the lyrics. It can still be coded, though. Like ‘Summer’ on the album is just about liking someone, but it doesn’t come out and say it’s about having a crush.”

Her musical tastes at the time were also running toward folkier sounds. “A lot of my go-to music is ‘70s prog and weird psychedelic music, but I go through phases. I’ve always loved English folk music — things like Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson  and Steeleye Span.” She wound up recording with Dave Mattacks, the legendary UK drummer (now locally based) who’s played with all the above. “That was one of the great experiences of my life. I also started realizing that a lot of my favorite music had acoustic instruments in it, and I don’t play acoustic guitar very much. I probably dialed back a notch on the distortion, which made it more pleasing to the ear and less jarring. And what’s crazy is that before I started recording, I got my grandmother’s old Gibson that was in her house in South Dakota all these years. So that was fortuitous – I had just bought a new one and it didn’t sound as good.”

Guitars always played a big role in Timony’s life, and one of her guitar students is in the current live band. Last month she made Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 250 top guitar players — She’s at #95, right between Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and metal shredder Joe Satriani. “That was a nice surprise. .I’ve never been one of those super shredders, so it was nice to see them acknowledge some inventiveness.”