‘IT’S about owning my own life/when I want to spend it making noise/writing songs about boys,” sings Rosie Bans on Doing It For The Love, a sassy testament to the Glasgow-born musician’s artistic conviction, and the final track on her debut album Identify Yourself.

Relationship tussles do feature here, her fifth release since starting her recording career in 2009, not least on opener Instincts, a Stevie Wonder-style slice of funk about the perils of ignoring red flags at the start of a new tryst.

“I use songwriting almost as a way of tapping into the subconscious as a currently single almost 30-year-old woman,” she says, fresh from a visit to the headquarters of RNIB Connect Radio in the city’s Partick. “Sometimes my songs come from a place I don’t know and I can write a lyric and take a step back and say: ‘Yes, that is how I feel, actually’.”

A liaison recalled at the heart of the album seems to have particularly affected Bans. Powered by her heart-pumping piano, London tells of someone who “gave me the summer, but took away my soul”.

“London is written like it’s an ex boyfriend who’s cheated on me and spent all my money,” clarifies Bans, who’s only recently back in Scotland after moving to the UK capital back in 2010. There were three strands to her working life there: a jobbing pianist in bars, clubs and restaurants, she also ran a ceilidh band which toured around England playing functions and weddings.

Somehow she also found time to work on her own music, but it came at a price.

“My energy levels got worn down to the extent I wasn’t sure I could do this any more,” she says. “To be around all those creative people and the music scene, that’s why I went. And I’m definitely a much better musician. But it taught me a lot about the fact you can’t do everything, and that a human being needs to rest.”

A hurtling, dizzying track, London showcases the impressive piano playing of Bans, a keysplayer whose flowing, baroque-tinged lines recall that of Tori Amos. Like Amos, a pianist more influenced by Hendrix than Chopin, Bans realised she wanted to make rock music soon after beginning to learn classical piano at school. The Finnieston youngster quickly moved on to keyboards, which she now considers her principle instrument. Her love of keys is why she recorded half the album at nearby La Chunky, a studio with a vintage Wurlitzer and a Rhodes Mark 1.

“Tori Amos is very influential to me,” says Bans. “When people mention her in relation to my music I’m like: ‘That’s a good thing’. She makes beautiful, nice music but when you get under the hood of it, it can be quite complex. In the new year we’re going to release Instincts as a single, and it’s definitely a marker of my style. There’s a few time signature changes and changes of key, and that’s part of my enjoyment of composing. But the groove that it’s got is my attempt to keep it as a pop song, keep it accessible.”

Accessible too is Home, a pop-folk track featuring the evocative, ribboning fiddle playing of Jack Smedley. Written in Berlin last year, it’s a love letter to the “water under my tongue... /the cold air on my skin” – to Scotland itself.

“I felt very guilty when I left Scotland, almost like I was betraying someone,” Bans says. “I lived in London for five years and then I moved to Berlin. And in the middle was Scotland pulling me back. People hold each other up more in Scotland. They care about others in a genuine way, they are more inclined to say yes to things, and help each other out. Scotland feeds me, nurtures me.”

Small wonder Amos is a touchstone for Bans. Aside from her obvious artistic attractions, the singer-songwriter is an empowering figure for many, no less so than a young woman getting bullied at school for having ginger hair. Bans addresses her own experiences in I Won’t Fade Into The Shade, a deceptively playful track about bullying she wrote after meeting the team behind Redhead Day UK.

“Being a redhead or ginger is a big part of my identity. It’s what people say to point me out: ‘The redhead girl’,” Bans says. “But kids can be crazily brutal. When I was about 14 I got pinned up against the wall by all the boys in the class. They wanted to see if my pubic hair was ginger. And then the teacher came back in and they got into trouble and nothing more was ever said.”

“It’s quite interesting with the #metoo hashtag on social media recently,” she says of the groundswell of women sharing their own experiences of harassment and abuse in the wake of the ongoing Harvey Weinstein scandal. Responding to the phenomenon earlier this week, Amos herself said she was now in “warrior mode”.

“In my 14-year-old brain it wasn’t to do with me being a woman, it was about being ginger,” Bans says. “I think that everything that people can put you down for you can empower yourself with. It’s just that this transition demands a lot of you, requires a lot of personal work. And women in general have to do this all the time.”

The singer-songwriter says her recent stint working with Connect Radio has helped bolster her belief in the power of transformation and self-empowerment.

“Their radio station is a form of empowerment, of visually impaired people doing things for themselves,” she says. “I think that’s what human beings do very well. We adapt and survive.”

Nov 2, Bar Bloc, Glasgow, details TBC

Identify Yourself is out tomorrow on Noise Bars Records

www.rosiebans.com