Rebekah Pulley’s sixth full-length studio album opens with a seven-minute track that is actually two songs rolled into one. “Central Avenue” and “The City” are about St. Petersburg. Written in the years between the release of her last album (2012’s Tralala), the songs address the many changes that’ve happened around, and within, Pulley, who downplays her gift for looking at things and then synthesizing her thoughts into songs.

“The songs are really just an observation of things coming and going, and getting older because the same thing happens in your life,” she told CL. She’s not upset about the changes, however, and even cracked a joke about not being able to get brunch at Ricky P’s on Central. The big buildings also have a silver lining in Pulley’s eyes.

“As far as musicians go, that kind of helps us in a way because there’s more people to come hear us play music,” she said.

And if the newcomers listen, they’ll hear a voice that’s become an essential cog in Tampa Bay’s creative culture. Like her heroes before her, Pulley has put in the time and become an inimitable totem in the songwriting scene. Two of those idols even play into the fiber of The Sea of Everything, Pulley’s first album in seven years.

“Jackpot City” was borne of a rum-drinking session Pulley and Ronny Elliott had after skipping a songwriting gathering in Memphis. A newscaster was on the television reading lottery numbers, when he screamed “jackpot city!” As a joke, Pulley wrote a song and sent it to Elliott who liked it enough to record it for his latest album, I’ve Been Meaning To Write, which is home to another Pulley-penned tune, “Nobody’s Cool Anymore.” Elliot’s version is in a different time signature than the drawl Pulley recorded for The Sea of Everything.

“I don’t know what was going through my head at the time, but I do feel like, maybe, I’m in a place where I’m not cool anymore,” Pulley explained.

She’s grown older, and time has gone by. Pulley sees things in a different perspective, now. In many ways, people are kind of just repeating things that have already been done. In the tune, Pulley, even makes that argument about herself.

“Here I am, the same as I was, letting it all ride on red — just because,” she sings. Thing is, Tampa Bay fans of folk and Americana always get lucky when Pulley does that, and the hand of another, very cool, Bay area musician figures into the formula on The Sea of Everything.

Recording started in 2015 at Steve Connelly’s Zen Studios where the famed producer got the bones of the album on tape before Pulley’s drummer, Tony Dolan, moved out of town. A final session with Connelly could not be recorded. A tree then fell on the Zen studio and caused the roof to cave in. Water damage ensued, and then an even more grievous call came when Connelly’s undiagnosed Hepatitis-C required a liver transplant and long recovery.

“We all were all freaking out thinking he was going to die,” Pulley said. “The whole record aside, he’s a really good friend, you know.”

So in the meantime she and bassist Rob Pastore — an original member of Pulley’s band, the Reluctant Prophets — brought the Connelly tracks back to their home studio where friends like SG Wood (the Hummingbirds) and Beth McKee added lead guitar and wurlitzer. Ohio songwriter Branden Barnett (who’d put his Ghost Shirt project on hiatus) moved into the area and became a Prophet. Dolan moved back. Harmonies were added to about half of the album’s songs before Pulley and Connelly spent countless hours on the mixes and final masters. Pulley settled on The Sea of Everything’s 13 songs, but she’s written about two records worth of stuff in the meantime.

Work won’t start on those albums until after the doors close on a pair of CD release parties (one on Saturday at St. Petersburg’s Hideaway Café, another two weeks later at Sarasota's Fogartyville Cafe), and Pulley quite frankly doesn’t have enough time to fully explain all the ways that she’s evolved in between 2012’s Tralala and The Sea of Everything.

“That’s a, ‘Let’s sit down and have a whiskey,’ conversation,” she said, hinting that there have been moments in her career when she attempted to steer her music towards the happy and upbeat sounds she thought listeners wanted to hear.

“I realized that’s a bad steer, and just steered away from it and into sort of just doing what comes natural.”

And what’s natural for Pulley — who released her debut, Here in the Real World in 2004 — is to just write and sing. Her life these days is quite different from the last non-songwriting job she had dancing at clubs.

“I like to dance, but I was really bad at doing the thing where you gotta go hustle the guys. I was so bad. I would just sit and talk to about their life,” she said. “I felt like I was a therapist or something.”

Even Pulley’s daughter is grown and taking art classes in Gainesville where she’s in a band called Brat Paque.

“She plays a ton of instruments,” Pulley said, joking that she tried to steer her offspring away from art. “I told her, ‘Be a rocket scientist or something that they make a lot of money.’”

But genetics (Pulley grew up with nine siblings in a musical family that traveled the country in a Winnebago) are hard to recircuit. Some things just won’t change, and Pulley refers to her kid when the idea of chasing, and creating, songs finds itself folded back into the conversation.

“I remember having memories of a little baby moving in my stomach and kicking,” Pulley explained. Sometimes writing songs creates a weirdly similar feeling. “Not necessarily in your stomach, but there’s that weird kicking going on, like, ‘I need to be birthed.’”

So yeah, a lot has changed within and around Pulley since over the years, but the songs have kept coming. Pulley and the Reluctant Prophets are going to keep recording them. And when it comes to the health of the Tampa Bay songwriting scene, that means fans might just keep singing, “jackpot city.”

Rebekah Pulley & the Reluctant Prophets Album Release. Sat., June 1. 6 p.m. $10. Hideaway Café, 1756 Central Ave., St. Petersburg. Hideawaycafe.biz. Read a full Q&A with Pulley here.