TORONTO -- You don't need to be bilingual to listen to Coeur de Pirate's new album, "Roses," and conclude that Beatrice Martin's pirate heart has been broken.

The wounds aren't particularly recent, however. With her first album in nearly four years, the Montreal-based songstress explores a years-ago breakup (reportedly from Jay Malinowski of Bedouin Soundclash) with the eagle-eyed view of someone now in a much happier place: married and raising a baby girl.

"Everything that came out was mainly emotions about wanting to move forward and wanting to have a positive outlook on life, even though the songs are still pretty sad," Martin said during an interview in Toronto this week.

"I think to understand what being hurt feels like you need to find true happiness. ... And that same goes to actually be happy -- you have to go through something really horrible.

"It's kind of what I went through and today because I'm happy, I can write those songs because I understand what went on."

Speaking of understanding, meanwhile, more listeners than ever will be able to parse Martin's emotion-sick ruminations, since for the first time the 25-year-old has divided her album between English and French -- with the scales actually teetering in favour of her non-native tongue.

Writing so much in English was both a practical challenge -- "I got it proofread," she conceded with a sheepish smile -- and a practical decision, given that Martin's robust fanbase in Quebec and France hasn't yet translated to a sizable English following.

She's now signed to Cherrytree/Interscope in the U.S., and she isn't shy about her ambition to seize a larger audience.

"I want to reach out to everybody," she said.

It helps that the brittle piano balladry upon which she established her career -- yielding two platinum records, two Juno Award nominations and four Felix Awards -- has blossomed into ornately orchestrated pop.

The songs here are so stormy and cinematic that they seem almost predestined to soundtrack the fall TV season's most softly lit heartbreak montages.

In fact, all that sweep and swell renders "Roses" perhaps Martin's least downcast set -- though she says motherhood had a hand in that, too.

"It changes everything," said Martin, whose daughter Romy was born in fall 2012. "My daughter really made me the better version of myself. I am a better person now. I'm a better human being. I'm patient and I'm centred and stable.

"I wasn't like that before. I was meaner. I was shy and I didn't know how to deal with certain things. And now she came along and she totally changed me.

"It really changes your songwriting," she added. "It was very grim before. My songs were very sad. And I couldn't get out of anything. It was the end of the world. And now, there's light at the end of it."

It was that newly skewed perspective that led Martin to writing "Drapeau blanc," which of course translates as "White Flag."

Martin wrote the song about her mother, a pianist who encouraged Martin's playing -- at times, perhaps, too strongly.

Martin began playing the piano at three years old and gained entry into the prestigious Conservatoire de musique du Quebec a Montreal at age nine. Five years later, she quit the conservatory, and her mother was crestfallen.

"The song basically talks about the relationship that we have, that is full of contradictions," Martin said.

"Because as much as I love her, she was still this severe figure in my life and I didn't know how to talk to her most of the time.

"And it's just to say: let's keep in touch, otherwise we'll stop talking. And that's not good, especially now that I have my own daughter."