Music: The unsinkable Molly Maher

Molly Maher got her first inkling she had breast cancer in the damnedest of places: onstage at First Avenue in front of a sellout crowd, playing at the Current's fifth-anniversary bash.

"I looked down and saw this cyst on my chest in the stage lights," the singer/songwriter recalled, "and had this very real and very wicked feeling that everything was about to change."

For the next 10 months, she underwent six chemotherapy and 33 radiation treatments. She lost her hair 18 days into the chemo, again with a First Avenue tie-in: She remembers that her hair started falling out in the restroom there when she was opening for Trampled by Turtles.

Through it all, Maher, 39, rarely missed a weekly Wednesday-night gig at Nye's with her band, the Disbelievers. "Some weeks I just couldn't do it," she said. "But even the shows that were hard to get through were therapeutic in a weird way.

"It's exactly the sort of thing that you don't want cancer to take from you," she added. "You don't want to give it that kind of power."

Cancer-free for almost a year, Maher is quick to emphasize that her new album, "Merry Come Up," is "not a cancer record." Rather, Maher's third record is more a showcase for her bandmates and the chemistry they've developed at Nye's. Standouts include the organ-pumped romp "Free to Go" and the shake-and-bake rocker "Chicken, No Bone." Maher still shows off a softer, more songwriterly side in "Cry Baby" and a few others.

"There are a few dark parts on the record, but mostly I think it has the same kind of spirit as the Nye's shows," said Disbelievers guitarist Paul Bergen. "Even when Molly was at her worst, if she did show up at Nye's she still sounded good, and we still had a good time."

Back in regular rotation -- and wig-free -- at a Nye's gig last month, Maher didn't offer up any overt references to her dastardly 2010 in her new songs. She did drop in a couple of covers that were rather telling, though, not just of her triumph but also of her band's prowess: Doug Sahm's count-your-blessings anthem "Be Real" and Social Distortion's "Sometimes I Do." In the latter, she sang, "Sometimes I wanna live to see 100/Sometimes I wanna lay down and die/Sometimes I'm weak, and sometimes I'm strong/You know that I've loved you all along."