It’s been five years since Melissa Auf der Maur — the Montreal-raised Hole and Smashing Pumpkins bassist — released any solo music.

It wasn’t supposed to take this long, there was some music ready to go, but the faltering music industry held her back. “I have literally been busy fighting lawyers and record companies,” she says on the phone from a small town in upstate New York.

Basically, her label, she says, “crumbled” and her “record was trapped in the system.” She could have thrown in the towel, but instead she tapped into her visual arts background, and made a movie, a comic book, an interactive website, and, finally, a new album. The projects are all based around one tune — the trippy rocker Out of Our Minds, which is out now. (A full album will be released in 2010.) The film, Auf der Maur explains, is a “fantasy, time travel film.”

“The song is the heart of the record,” she says. “It’s literally a cry to travel out of our minds and into a hearts, which is the story of the film. It’s about a woman who is on the hunt for a heart and travels through time. It’s a visual epic, with car crashes and bleeding trees.” Auf der Maur also wrote the firm score — with A Perfect Circle bassist Paz Lenchantin — which she says was “liberating.”

The comic book puts the film into pictures, an idea she got from her hero Glenn Danzig who has a comic book line, while the website will “allow people to continue to experience this in different ways,” she explains.

Developing all these ideas wasn’t easy. She actually had to mortgage her two houses (she’s got one in upstate N.Y. and one in Montreal) to pay for everything. “That’s the way I do things,” she says. “I believe in going broke.”

But, despite the cost, Auf der Maur knew she had to do something different with her career.

While she can now be called a comic book author, a filmmaker and even a web producer, she’s still most excited by making music. “If I had to pick one mode of communication to express something to the masses, it would be a three-minute song. No question,” she says. “To communicate furthest and widest it’s going to be music. Music is definitely the heart of all this.”

Appeared in Metro on December 4, 2009.

Pic via