Jo Lawry

Australian vocalist and songwriter Jo Lawry’s debut album, “I Want to Be Happy,” made a lot of people feel that way.

Released in 2008, “I Want to Be Happy” drew the ears of critics on both hemispheres, earning luminescent reviews in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time Out New York, the New Republic and Downbeat Magazine, which christened it nothing less than one of its “best CDs of the 2000s.” And now, after years of work in the jazz world, international tours with her songwriting heroes, an appearance in an Academy Award-winning film and exposure to countless fans across the globe, Lawry is ready for her follow-up.

“Taking Pictures,” set for release this spring, marks not only an evolution from her previous work but also a redrawing of how she makes music. Lawry wrote all of the record’s 10 tracks (including “Impossible,” the sterling duet with Sting), shifting her focus from vocal jazz to a guitar-based singer-songwriter sound. “I wanted to make something I’d want to listen to,” she says. “I know so many jazz musicians who are incredibly gifted at what they do, and you get in their car and they’re listening to ‘Pet Sounds.’ You have to be listening to music that sounds like what you’re creating, and so much of the time for me it was simple three-chord singles with a killer hook and a beautiful story. That’s what I wanted to explore: Why do those things cut to our hearts? What’s in there that’s so magical to us?”

There’s much that cuts to the heart in “Taking Pictures,” from the gorgeous, effortless sway of “Impossible” to the multi-layered sweep of “Adelaide” to the brittle and heartbreaking “I Said No.” The songs, she says, came in an unusually lively creative burst. “Most of it was written in a crazy frenzy in the few months leading up to recording, but at the same time, a lot of the songs had been kicking around. It’s like those locusts that are dormant for years and then come flying out all at once.”

It’s also the first time she’s experimented with the guitar, and by “experimented” she means “play at all.” “The musical anchors here were usually generated by me putting the guitar in a weird tuning and seeing where my fingers landed. I’m a complete innocent on the guitar. Quite a lot of the songs required one or — at the most — two fingers on the fretboard. Some of them could probably be played by a sloth,” she says, laughing.

“Taking Pictures” came together over the past two years, but to be fair, she’s been quite busy in her side job performing as a featured vocalist with Sting. In 2009, Lawry joined the musician’s band for the concert DVD “A Winter’s Night... Live From Durham Cathedral,” and the pairing proved fruitful — so much so that Lawry was invited back as the sole female vocalist on the orchestral “Symphonicity” tour and its follow-up “Back to Bass” tour, on which she also played violin. The international tours brought her to such venues as the Metropolitan Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Kremlin, Piazza San Marco in Venice and the Sydney Opera House. Sting called on Lawry for his new material as well; in 2013, she collaborated and performed on songs for “The Last Ship,” Sting’s first collection of original material in more than a decade. And in 2014, she joined Sting and Paul Simon for a co-headlining tour that, by the spring of 2015, will have crossed America, Australia and Europe. “I think watching Sting work is what really broke down the songwriting walls for me,” she says. “He’s always exploring,. If he wants to explore playing the lute, for crying out loud, he’ll do it.”

Lawry’s career spans the globe and includes several shelves’ worth of awards and accolades. She grew up on an almond farm in South Australia and, after a brief flirtation with operatic study, began her formal instruction in the jazz department at the Elder Conservatorium at Adelaide University. From there, acclaim came quickly. Lawry was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to complete her master’s degree in jazz performance in 2003, was a semifinalist at the 2004 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and in 2005 placed in Australia’s National Jazz Awards. The following year, Lawry commenced her studies at New England Conservatory for a Doctor of Musical Arts in jazz performance, and in 2008 she was selected by Carnegie Hall to participate in a weeklong collaborative program led by Bobby McFerrin. She continued working with Carnegie Hall as the featured artist in their ‘Musical Connections’ pilot program from 2010-2012. From 2003 to 2010, she served as Artist-in-Residence at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C.

In 2013, Lawry was featured prominently in the film “20 Feet From Stardom,” which chronicled the lives and careers of “the backup singers behind some of the greatest musical legends of the 21st century” and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Lawry currently lives in New York City, where she leads her own band and appears at such clubs as Birdland and Joe’s Pub.