Ruthie Foster, courtesy Jody Domingue.

Ruthie Foster knows it’s Healing Time. When Foster decided during the pandemic that it was time to work a on a new album, she wanted to make sure to include her band in the writing process.

Masked and physically distanced, they ruminated on what awaited them at the other end of lockdown. They emerged with an album that blends blues, gospel, jazz and Americana—and suffused with optimism and hope.

“This is my ninth or tenth album, but for the most part I’ve kind of gotten away from writing my own material,” she says in a recent video call.

This was partly due to her love of being a “song stylist.” Foster is a skilled interpreter of other people’s songs. She had enjoyed choosing songs that spoke to her and putting her own stamp on them, but Foster decided it was time to get back to writing.

“I just thought I’d just go back into my vault,” she says of getting started.

Fittingly, Foster keeps a picture of Prince next to where she keeps the tapes she’s recorded over the years on her four-track recorder. She listened back to old songs and song fragments she’d written and never used, and found a lot that she liked.

“I just needed to add a few verses to show where I am now,” she says. “The journey is inside of the song.”

While writing in her friend’s house, she would cook for her band as they worked on the songs. She says that came naturally to her as an eldest child. Foster says it’s in her DNA.

“I’d have a stew going, because that could cook while we were writing,” she says.

A friend had put her house up for sale and offered it to Foster to use while the band worked on her songs. There was a piano in the living room, and sometimes they were able to knock out a whole song in a day. There were distractions, but they actually helped the songwriting process. A pup would need to be fed, or there’d be potential home buyers coming for a visit.The breaks helped Ruthie Foster and the band clear their minds. When they started up again they could finish whatever part they were stuck on before or find something new a song needed.

“I think I probably helped my girl sell her house, too,” she says, laughing, because it smelled so good in the house from her cooking. “People would walk in and think, ‘If I lived here, I could cook this!’”

Foster wrote most the songs on Healing Time with her band, but there was one cover she just couldn’t resist including. “Feels Like Freedom” was written Broadway actress Joanna Jones (“Hamilton”) and songwriter Adrianne Gonzalez, and when Foster heard it, she wished she’d written it. The song was hitting exactly where she was at, she says.

“Get up and just take one more step … we’re gonna be fine, and for me that’s what this album’s about,” she says of the song. And of the album as a whole: “It’s got a lot of other twists and turns in it, but that’s real life… it’s grown-up music, when you’ve been through something.”

Foster’s tour in support of Healing Time will bring her to Berkeley on Dec. 16. She has a soft spot for the Bay Area, she says, because it’s where she found joy in her touring life again.

“[I would] grind and grind and there wasn’t a lot of joy except for those 75 to 90 minutes on stage,” she says.

But on one chilly day in San Francisco during a tour, she decided to treat herself to brunch by the water, and the sun came out and something clicked for her. Foster decided on the spur of the moment to give herself a tourist day, riding a hop-on, hop-off bus.

“I was taking selfies while I’m on the bus and I just had this eye-opening moment, that this is what I’m doing for a living,” she says. “I can take myself out and I can have a fun time, and it was a turning point for me.”

Now, Foster always makes sure she builds time in to sightsee and enjoy the places she stops on tour. That attitude of gratitude started in the Bay Area.

“Something about that area just did that for me, and I’ll never forget that. So I do love going back there to play,” she says.

Foster, who’s been nominated for three Grammy awards over the years among other accolades, says no matter where she goes, people can relate to the blues. Despite the blues being American music, Foster says it translates everywhere.

“I’ve been around the world, and [when] you sing the blues, people just connect to it, up and down, whether it’s in the middle of Mexico or in the mountains,” she says. “Blues is a witness to your life. It’s your life in song.”

Follow Rachel Alm at Twitter.com/thouzenfold and Instagram.com/thousandfold.