You might not know the name Kathryn Calder, but chances are you’d recognize her voice: The singer/keyboard player is one of the many talented souls who records and performs with The New Pornographers. But tonight, she plays Seattle with her primary creative outlet, the equally delightful Immaculate Machine, in support of the trio’s new album Immaculate Machine’s Fables (which features guests including Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy and Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand). In between mouthfuls of yogurt, Kathryn fielded a couple questions for “Line Out” before hitting the road.

What is the biggest difference between what you do in the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine?
Immaculate Machine is my band, and I’ve been in it now for five or six years. I do a lot of the songwriting. It is more of a creative project. In the Pornographers, I show up, and I play, and have a good time. Somebody else deals with most of the songwriting; Carl [Newman] is usually the one in the control booth, flying the ship.

How did your song “Dear Confessor” come about?
That was one of the first songs we had for the new record. It was written almost immediately after we recorded our last record. That always seems to happen. You make a record, and then you have all this creativity flying around, so you want to start writing songs for a new record. So that was one of them. It was written by Brooke [Gallupe], but we all collaborate. I wrote some of the words for it, and my keyboard and bass parts.

(Curious? Listen to “Dear Confessor” here.)

Did you have specific goals for this record, as opposed to the earlier ones?
Yes. This time around, we wanted to have more instruments. On almost all of our previous records, we tried to bang out some sort of facsimile of how we play them live. We didn’t put on too many arrangements, because we were concerned with creating things live. On this new record, we had a lot more time, and more instruments to fool around with. We were more concerned with the record being its own thing, and figured we’d change the songs around however we needed to, in order to play them live.

So you had to learn how to perform all the new songs live after writing them?
Yeah, most of them. Some of the string parts made it difficult. I have a real hesitation about playing strings on my keyboard. I don’t know why; I don’t find it bad when other people do it. But I like real instruments in general. But until you have eight roadies, it makes it difficult to carry along organs and pianos and all that.

What flavor of yogurt are you eating?
Just plain. Nothing. I used to hate plain yogurt, but now I quite enjoy it. Especially the Greek-style. I’m a big fan of that, maybe because there’s so much fat in it. Once on the road, I accidentally put some in the freezer, so it basically became frozen yogurt, and it was the best thing ever. We put it on pancakes. So I highly recommend storing your Mediterranean-style yogurt in the freezer.

Immaculate Machine play at the Sunset in Ballard tonight at 9 PM, with Tea Cozies and Mr. Gnome.