She’s got seven studio records to her credit, but Bif Naked says she’s never liked the studio. Scratch that, she “hates” –- said with double exclamation points, googly eyes and a pause for emphasis -- the studio. “I like performing, I’ve always thought that’s where my strength lied,” says the singer, whose sweet-yet-snarling, scissor-kicking performances have been a staple of the Canadian tour circuit for more than a decade. “I get really nervous in the studio, self-conscious.”

Studio work on her forthcoming LP The Promise (due May 5) started in April last year, she says -– not quite four months after Bif, 37, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Treatment, she says, began immediately. Three weeks after a startling self-examination, she was in for a lumpectomy. Chemo followed. Bif’s philosophy throughout the entire ordeal: “You don’t miss a beat. You go to work and you do what you do.”

That’s clear the morning of the interview. She’s in the early phases of a press blitz for The Promise, keeping a MicroMachine Man-frantic pace with reporters who shuffle in and out of a suite at a downtown Toronto hotel. And while her outlook is that she’s “in the clear,” there are still a few serious health matters that have yet to be addressed: she’s scheduled for a hysterectomy (to reduce the chance of a recurrence) and is also taking medication to get rid of a blood clot in her aorta.

During the making of The Promise, Bif’s focus was just as much about getting ‘er done. She walked to work every morning from her Vancouver apartment. “They moved the studio a block from me, and the office. So I just had to trudge up the hill, which was great, really great.” She talks blithely about the symptoms she experienced in the course of the eight-month project, matter-of-factly pulling down a fluorescent yellow tank top to flash the dent in her chest left by the lumpectomy or the round scar near her collarbone left from vascular surgery. “My glands here would swell with chemo,” she says, pointing around her jaw, “and that would push on my voice box.”

“I couldn’t sing for 20 days. No lie. Straight. I was in bed for 20 days,” she goes on.

“You work around it,” she says, listing off the various challenges: extreme fatigue due to the radiation, a staph infection, emergency vascular surgery. “It seemed like it was taking forever to record the record!”

Fortunately, making The Promise was the most “joyful” recording experience of her career.

“I’m so excited about [the record]. It was so different for me. Not because I wasn’t feeling well most of the time, but because I worked with Jason Darr.”

Darr produced The Promise, and while he hasn’t helmed one of Bif’s albums in the past, the erstwhile Neurosonic guitarist has been a hired gun in her touring band since 2003, by Bif’s count. That would be him playing the hard-rock riff on current single “Sick.” They co-wrote the song together -– among several others (she’s proudest of the ballads, “Crash and Burn” and “Blue Jay”). Sharing songwriting credit on the lyrics was a first for Bif, whose songs have often put her heart on her tatted-up sleeve -- an approach that was there from the start. (Her first ever single, 1995’s “Tell On You,” addresses her experience as a rape survivor.)

While mucking through a bout of writer’s block, Bif says Darr came to her with a few of his own thoughts for the lyrics. “It was like the sun came out, you know, the ‘AH!’ angel scene, the big epiphany,” she says. “It just went from there, and it was a lot of fun and he made me laugh every day, no matter how sick I was.”

As for his skills as a producer, she says: “He’s a fucking taskmaster. He never treated me like I was sick -– which was great.

“He was hard on me -– harder on me than anyone’s ever been on my vocals. And you’d think he could take it a little easy on me considering I was fucking bald and jaundiced.”

On the chorus of “Sick,” she goes from girlish and sassy sweetness to retching out the titular line in a guttural roar that ought to leave blood in your mouth.  She recorded while doing chemo, Bif says. “I was fucked,” she says plainly.

“Jason really kicked my ass. I never sang lower than I did on this record. I’ve never screamed. I mean, I’ve screamed before, but not like that. He made me dig, and he made me work very, very hard.”

The song’s been spinning on rock radio since mid March. And while her performance philosophy has long been “What Would Chi Pig Do?,” she's never been this aggressive before. To be clear, though, “Sick” has nothing to do with cancer. She says none of the songs are, at least not explicitly. “‘Sick’, the single, that’s a song that’s very rage inspired, but lots of things before chemo made me really sick,” she says, explaining that she looked to things outside of herself for inspiration instead of her present situation.

The next step is touring, with plans to schedule dates through the summer. A June 27 gig at Boonstock, a rock festival taking place outside of Edmonton, was announced earlier this week.

“I don’t know [if I’ll be ready]. My fans will know. I’ll look at them and go ‘Am I purple? And they’ll go ‘Yeah, you’re purple.’ And I’ll go ‘Fuck!’ and then we’ll know how long a set can be.

“I just want to get back to what I do.”

The Promise is in stores May 5.

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