Sarah Dougher: Latin Let Live.

Sarah Dougher plays The Zoo on June 13. The Bluff is in stores now.

Sarah Dougher is exceedingly smart. An expert in ancient literature with a degree in Latin and Medieval Latin, she also plays organ in pop punk bands such as Cadallaca and The Crabs and is now declining headlines as a singer/songwriter of obvious talent. Reviewers have got very fuzzy round the edges about Dougher's third and latest set, The Bluff, an abstract name that conjures plenty of possible meanings, as do many of her songs. And don't forget the Latin: it'll come in handy later.

Dougher doesn't come across as some quasi-intellectual dabbling her toe in the murky waters of rock'n'roll; this woman would love to quit her day job and just write songs and play music and teach. And if The Bluff is bigger sounding than anything she's done before, well, Sarah would like to take it a step further now.

"I have a lot of ideas all the time," she says. "They come to me then pass through me and change into other things. At this point I really want to figure out a way to quit my job at an ad agency three days a week. I really want to collaborate with people in other media. I want to work with film-makers and writers and playwrights to see if I can work with people, not just on a musical level, but on a narrative level as well.”

"And musically I want to become even more complex. I want to do an album that has vibes and accordions and a string section. I really, really, love the idea of making bigger, more complex arrangements. Bands I admire a lot tend to make more orchestrated albums so that's my goal."

The Bluff is a perfect bedrock for future Dougher: it contains elements of all her previous work but solidifies her approach both sonically and texturally. However, to understand Dougher you have to take in her words. A storyteller who favours the narrative, she is capable of scintillating word play. Over it all rides the question: what is The Bluff?

"I was fascinated by the idea that there would be a way for people to lie and that that would be okay," she says. "Bluffing is basically a socially sanctioned way of lying, right. On the other hand 'the bluff' is a way of describing a piece of land in English. I don't know the etymology of the word in terms of the geographical location."

"Both the bluff as an emotional, psychological move, and the bluff as a physical place sort of came together so that one was a metaphor of the other, or the metaphorical power of the word would disappear because the two things were the same thing for me. I wanted to introduce that as an idea, so that's what it means to me."

Songs themselves can be a bluff as well and the songwriter can also be bluffing.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I think, especially for women singer/songwriters, the idea of bluffing is not a very common one. Telling stories is not as valued as the confessional. If you are going to read my record straight and believe that all the times I said 'I' or 'me' or 'you' the 'I' and the 'me' meant me and the 'you' meant you, then you wouldn't ever think I lied or bluffed or told a story or anything. That's part of what I think art is about -it's turning the emotional impact of personal experience into something else. I don't know that my stories are narratively based as much as they convey a narrative of emotional movement or something like that."

When it comes to her academic background Dougher says that while she loves teaching Latin it doesn't appeal to "hook my wagon to the academic nag. I'm not an academic at heart. I'm a writer, I'm a creative person, I'm a teacher, but those things don't equal being a professor in America right now. There are a lot of other things you have to put up with to make it as a professor - and I couldn't handle them."

Latin, of course, is a root of language and everything spins off that. It brings out in Dougher a lovely explanation that, in many ways, shadows her gifts as a songwriter.

"When I talk to my students about, let's say, verbs of perceiving. How does a person think in Latin, think about sight? Do they think about it as a tangible thing or an intangible thing? That very idea is so complex and so fascinating to me that I could write a whole album based on it. The diff