Listen to Margaret Glaspy’s “Emotions & Math”

Last year, in an interview with Fretboard Journal, the singer and songwriter Margaret Glaspy revealed something at once sensible and surprising. “I’ve really tried to make songwriting a study or like a job,” she said. “I’ve tried not to make it conditional to how I’m feeling.” She is a former fiddler from Northern California who moved to Boston and then Brooklyn, perfecting along the way an expansive sort of minimalism: she writes sharp little songs that gesture at decades of influences, from coffee-shop folk to 78-r.p.m. jazz. Her début album is “Emotions & Math” (ATO), in which pretty songs often turn prickly, enriched by carefully measured infusions of dissonance and grit. The music is unadorned, the better to showcase Glaspy’s electric guitar and her extraordinary voice, as well as her plainspoken lyrics, which are, by turns, gently sentimental and firmly not: “I think you might be crying when I’m gone / You and I have been a mistake, I let it linger too long.” She recorded this album twice, at home, before going to the studio, and it is no slight to say that the final version retains some of the spindly energy of a demo tape.