ON THE COUCH Judith Owen works through pain and betryal on a long-delayed album.

Photograph: Deborah Anderson

Until she heard a familiar voice calling out her name, Welsh singer-songwriter Judith Owen failed to recognize her future husband, actor Harry Shearer, when she first visited him in New York. “All the time we’d been dating in London, I’d been dating Derek Smalls,” Owen, 41, explains, referring to Shearer’s role as the bass player in This Is Spinal Tap, the 1984 mockumentary he also cowrote. When their paths first crossed, Shearer, 64, was involved in the satirical band’s 1992 reunion tour. Owen, who performs at the Metropolitan Room on Friday 26 and Saturday 27, was singing one of her tunes during a four-hour brunch shift at a London hotel. Struck by her soulful voice and melodic gifts, Shearer thought of her as “a female Paul McCartney,” he says. The attraction didn’t end there. “My eyes went boing-oing-oing,” Shearer says, recalling a beautiful blond in a lilac suit.

“The suit was green,” Owen reminds him, rolling her eyes.

Shearer, who provides the voices of Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders and others on The Simpsons and writes for The Huffington Post, had arrived first for an appointment at the Soho Grand, where he and Owen were staying for the opening of Christopher Ulivo’s “Who Needs the Explorers Club, Anyway,” a video exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery in Chelsea. His wife, he explained, was upstairs “being a girl.” Her hair was still wet when she arrived. During the conversation they offered competing imitations of Arianna Huffington, mimicked Joe Lieberman and Project Runway’s Tim Gunn, finished each other’s sentences and backed each other up. Somehow, their mutual admiration amused rather than grated.

Owen, too, says she was instantly attracted to her future husband and collaborator. Learning that his previous girlfriend suffered from depression, she “laughed a very British laugh and said, ‘I’ve never had depression,’ ” she recounts. “She campaigned like a Republican,” Shearer says. “I was Sarah Palin in those days,” Owen confirms, of her decision to selectively embellish reality.

Truthfully, Owen says she was “a bottomless pit of need.” Her ongoing battle with depression and journey toward health can be traced in her eight albums; Mopping Up Karma, her latest, is filled with irresistibly catchy tunes dealing with betrayal, suicide and misunderstanding, as well as romantic love. “Creatures of Habit,” the first single, lingers in the brain for days. The lyrics—“We live on hope / We learn to cope / Till the ones we’ve hurt come home again / So please come home”—are achingly sad; Owen’s soaring soprano infuses the bouncy tune with lived emotion. In “Mother Mercy,” the singer evokes her mother, who committed suicide when Owen was 15, expressing joy and forgiveness in a mellow groove: “Don’t you know that I’ve done denying / I’m crying with laughter.”

Releasing Mopping Up Karma earlier this year was also a symbolic triumph for Owen: Recorded with Glen Ballard for Capitol Records between 1998 and 2000, the project was dropped by the label and languished for years after Owen bought back the masters. Capitol, she explains, had wanted throwaway, girlish songs—“everything I’m not,” she says. In 2005, Shearer and Owen formed their own label, Courgette (French for “zucchini”—as in the famous foil-wrapped image enhancer employed by Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap). After two songs from Karma, “Message from Heaven” and “I Promise You,” were used in the television series Felicity and Charmed, prompting inquiries from fans, Shearer insisted that she return to the abandoned album, adamantly advising her not to “shy away from what hurts you,” as he put it. “The reason I am strong is because I am terribly damaged,” she adds. “I work to deal with my flaws.”

“She never was anything but incredibly sure-footed in the studio,” Shearer says. “I love this record, and I love to watch her work.”

“Work allows us to be the best versions of ourselves,” Owen concurs, gazing at him. It might be irritating, were it not so clearly true.

Judith Owen plays the Metropolitan Room Fri 26 and Sat 27.