Gazarek's first self-produced album, Thirsty Ghost, is also the most personal of her career to date. Featuring songs selected over a four-year period, the album sees Gazarek shedding an artistic skin, from singing light love songs to drawing from the deeper wells of the human condition. Though Gazarek has stated that Thirsty Ghost isn't a breakup record per se, the theme of betrayal weaves its way through the album, from a brilliant reimagining of Sam Smith's ‘I'm Not The Only One’ to the most desolate take imaginable on ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’, the latter set up by pianist Stu Mindeman's spacious, sorrowing chorale. There's a tempestuous ‘Lonely Hours’, cast in a deliberately askew 5/4, plus Geoffrey Keezer's fiery, muscular arrangement of ‘Jolene’. Keezer's description of his arrangement as being “Trent Reznor meets Game of Thrones” indicates just how far from Nashville we are. The collection reaches its catharsis in the closing ‘Distant Storm’, for which Gazarek appends new lyrics to Brad Mehldau's ‘When It Rains’, and into which guest/mentor Kurt Elling interpolates a Gazarek-penned poem which contains a line that helpfully crystallises the album's entire raison d’être: “The warmth of sunlight comes and goes, but beauty only grows when it rains”.