Vandana Vishwas has the kind of voice that won't suffice as background music. But had her husband, Vishwas Thoke, not prompted and prodded her into action, we might never have known it existed.

“I give my husband credit; he brought me to music again,” Vishwas says by phone from her Toronto home. “I’m doing music now, because of him.”

Vishwas’s new album, Monologues, is a deceptive title, because it really refers to the unspoken dialogues that exist in our everyday lives: the conversations in our heads, the exchange between an artist and her music. This record (her second, following her 2009 debut, the Lover...) also highlights the newfound possibilities in the creative collision of cultures. Monologues pairs Vishwas’s old world (classical Indian composition) and new one (jazz, electric guitar, Japanese koto).The Toronto transplant, by way of India and a five-year stopover in Dubai, arrived here in 2002. Vishwas had long since stifled her childhood dreams of becoming a Bollywood playback singer, a dream she’d come close to realizing but eventually abandoned, partly to pursue a more traditional career and partly because of the lifelong pain from which she suffers.

“I don’t have a proper hip joint,” Vishwas says, explaining what happened as the result of a doctor using a "dirty needle" on her as a baby. “My left hip joint is completely absolved, I don’t have ball, I don’t have socket, so it is painful 24/7. The intensity varies and it depends how stressful life is.... If you want to be a Bollywood playback singer, you have to go to Mumbai, and at that time I was very young, just starting my life, and my physical condition, it’s not very easy for me to travel in local trains there. It’s a big huge city and at that time I couldn’t afford to buy a car or take a taxi all the time, and living alone in that big city wasn’t very easy, so I had to give up that dream. I didn’t realize I was giving up music gradually.”

At school Vishwas met Thoke, and the two dabbled in music (her) and poetry (him) while pursuing architecture. They moved to Dubai and worked long hours with little music for five years. After the events of 9/11, they decided to move to Toronto, and when they arrived in May 2002 Vishwas sought out concerts and music festivals to help get a better grasp of their new homeland.

“Toronto is a culturally diversified place,” Vishwas says. “It’s like a mini world. People from all over the worlds you can see here. We used to go to different concerts and festivals and shows in restaurants. I started enjoying living in Toronto and then my husband realized I am again interested in music. And he was already interested pushing me before [laughs], but I didn’t listen to him.”

Finally, Thoke broke through and Vishwas made her first record at the age of 39. The Lover... was met with critical acclaim, receiving multiple awards and honours, prompting Vishwas’s return to the stage. When it came time to begin work on Monologues, the singer provided Thoke with some themes she wanted to explore, and their collaboration took shape against the backdrop of their shared immigrant experience.

“When we came to Canada initially, there was a cultural shock, but I tried to understand and it was really fun because Canada has not just one culture, but a mixture of cultures, which interests me more,” Vishwas says. “Then I thought I cannot just sing one genre all the time, one topic all the time. It was in my mind, you know, I always talk to myself. Most of us we do that. Then I thought maybe there are two selves within all of us, one that is expressed and one that is not. The one that [is] expressed to the outer world is dialogue and the one that is not expressed is monologue. Then I thought, this will be my thing. This will give me all freedom to do all genres. It gave me freedom to think broader.”

That freedom is evident throughout Monologues. Saxophone, flute, electric guitars, bass and drums are used in tandem with sitars, tablas and other classical Indian instruments. Vishwas composed the songs using a variety of Hindustani musical structures and songwriting devices, such as melodic raags and semi-classical thumris.

The stand-out number, “Des Se Door,” is an ambitious thumri, with lyrics from Thoke, who was instructed by Vishwas to write about somebody missing something. He penned the song about Vishwas herself, much to the singer’s chagrin, and its title is roughly translated as “my lover has brought me away from my motherland.”

“I was wondering, why did he write on me? He said, ‘You always complain about winter in Canada!’ For me, October to May is winter in Canada, whereas back home there are six types of seasons,” Vishwas says, laughing.

She decided to write the piece in seven parts, or seven raags, one for each season in India, plus one for Canada.

“I picked a raag that is not existing in Western landscapes, raag todi, and I combined it with drums and bass and saxophone, and with the saxophone, there’s a little sitar piece,” Vishwas says. “After that it goes to India. It was fun to do this kind of necklace of raags and it sounds very beautiful.”

Vishwas is also proud of “Bas Baahon Mein,” the first piece she challenged herself to writing in the jazz style. It was the first music to truly captivate her back in those heady first days in 2002. The real magic of the song, though, is to hear the familiar jazz rhythms set against Vishwas’s soaring Indian vocals. This is her most direct nod to her past and the Canada she has come to call home. This is the new dream, far better than any Bollywood playback celebrity. This is music that’s all her own.

“Jazz gives me the sense of freedom and a sense of romance,” Vishwas says. “I’m doing music for myself first, so I don’t feel it’s risky. If I’m liking it, some people will probably be there in the world who like this sound, too.”