To call her new album, “Space,” a debut is a bit of a misnomer for Kendall Jane Meade. The Grosse Pointe native, who’s been in Los Angeles the past seven or so years after a long tenure in New York, has been making music for most of her life — while growing up in the metro area, during her time at Boston University, in the band Juicy and under the moniker Mascott, whose three albums during the 2000s garnered critical acclaim.

Meade had “taken a pause” from active music-making after moving west, but the aftermath of a divorce led to “Space,” and to finally billing under her own name.

“I came back to it really out of necessity in a way,” Meade, 53, explains via Zoom from Culver City, where she also works in advertising brand management. “I didn’t realize it until (the divorce) that music was truly a tool for me to process my emotions. When something like that happens to you, you go through your toolbox of how you’re going to get through it — therapy, life coaches, psychics, walking … everything.

“I realized during that time I was feeling the best when I was making music. So music brought me back to me. It brought me back to the center of who I was. It was important for me to really reclaim myself, and (music) was the best and most honest way I had.”

That was something Meade got a sense of early on, actually. As the youngest of four — “The mascot of the family,” she notes — Meade “was kind of shy because my brother and older sisters were all boisterous and running around.” Her mother, noticing Meade “was kind of retreating a little bit,” enrolled her in a children’s theater program at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial around the time she was in second grade. “I had a comfort on stage from an early age,” Meade recalls, which led to school choirs and a cappella groups and an obsession with music that included publishing a fanzine, Buzz Magazine Boston, while she was in college.

It was there she also formed Juicy, which subsequently moved to New York. “I just always loved being around musicians, and it was also such an exciting time, ’cause there were so many female musicians,” says Meade, who also worked with Sparklehorse, Lloyd Cole, the Spinanes and others. “I had an amazing musical community. … Especially in New York, there was just an embarrassment of riches all around me. If I wasn’t promoting an album, I was collaborating, popping over to a club, jumping up and singing backup.

“I was continually fed by music. It was a really inspiring, really fun time in my life.”

Meade didn’t abandon music entirely when she and her then-husband moved to Los Angeles. “I was doing covers and things,” she notes, “but I had really taken a pause from writing and recording full bodies of work for almost 12, 13 years.” It was her longtime collaborator Charles Newman, who had also moved to Los Angeles, who encouraged her to get back to music by bringing her into the studio to sing backup on projects he was working on. That, in turn, prodded her back into her own creativity.

“(Newman) didn’t realize he was actually helping me heal,” Meade remembers. “I started using my voice memo and then I started writing notes down, melodies and things. My friend, Anders Parker, would be like: ‘Hey, I wrote this piano part. Write melody over it. I was sort of quietly making music.”

The track with Parker became “How to Do Nothing” on “Space,” while Kris Gruen, who co-wrote the album’s cathartic closing track “Heaven On a Car Ride,” took Meade on tour with him in Europe, which helped clear the creative pipes as well. “Getting back to that version of me felt amazing,” says Meade, who played a weekly residency at Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles in October. “When I got off the tour, I was inspired and kept writing. I made a promise to myself I would play as many shows as possible to get comfortable again.”

Also impactful was a holiday trip back to Detroit to visit her father. Meade reached out to local musician and longtime friend Matt Van, who lined up and accompanied Meade for a show at the Polka Dot in Hamtramck. Hearing her new songs, Van suggested doing some recording at Electric Six veteran Zack Shipps’ studio, where they recorded demos that laid the foundation for “Space’s” title track and “The Garden.” Van co-wrote the latter, as well as the song “Temporary.”

The result is an album different from anything Meade has done before. Its organic, often spacious arrangements informed by 90s indie rock and a confessed new “obsession” with classic singer-songwriter motifs. “I’d Like to Know Myself,” meanwhile, starts with a classic Rolling Stones-style riff played by another expatriate Detroiter, Eli Wulfmeier (aka Leroy From The North), who’s on five other tracks. “It’s sort of a theme for the album — friends helping,” Meade acknowledges. “Everything felt like a hug, total support and elevation for what I was trying to do with the album, which was to express myself and encourage others to do the same.”

Part of that expression, of course, dealt with her divorce, but “Space” — inspired by her ex’s declaration that he needed more of it — is significantly more gentle and affirming than more vitriolic breakup albums such as Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” or Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.”

“I wasn’t doing this to trash my ex or have an anger release,” Meade explains. “To me it’s honoring the marriage, every part of it. I just didn’t want to close that chapter without having closure. It’s very much my personality to do it in this way.”

Now, Meade has opened, or re-opened and certainly re-embraced, her muse. She filmed a video for the Madonna-referencing “Stereo” in Detroit with director Mitch McCabe and another clip for “The Garden.” She’s looking forward to playing live in support of the album and especially to making more music in the near future.

“Mascott was my band, essentially, but I had that moniker because I wasn’t ready to fully step into putting my name out there,” Meade says. “But now’s the right time, and I’m just excited to keep writing and keep writing and living the life of a musician.”