Crystal Bowersox is back and she’s bullish on Toledo.

After a four-year odyssey in which she worked her way from the obscurity of the Toledo bar scene and busking the streets of Chicago to national fame on American Idol, Bowersox has moved back to northwest Ohio.

“Some people know it and they see me bugging around town and say ’What are you doing here?’ ” she said in a telephone interview this week as she made her way to a show in Bloomington, Ill.

Her reason for moving back after living in Portland, Chicago, and touring relentlessly was simple: she wanted her now 5-year-old son Tony to be able to spend time with his grandparents.

Bowersox, who grew up in Elliston, Ohio, acknowledged that she could move again at some point as she needs access to music business cities such as Nashville, New York and Los Angeles, but for now Toledo is home again.

“I’m a touring musician and I’m on the road anyway. It doesn’t matter where I live. I know there are some really cool things happening in Toledo that just need some love and support and I really believe that it is on the upswing and I really want to be a part of that.”

She cited the burgeoning local art scene as an example and said she plans to do a workshop at the University of Toledo, and would like to continue working with the Toledo School for the Arts, where she went to high school.

Bowersox is active promoting a number of social issues, including organic farming, protecting the environment, and helping the LGBT community. She said she wants to spur discussion of these and other causes in the city rather than grump about what the area may lack. “If I never do anything about what I complain about, it’s not going to get better,” she said.

Just don’t expect to see her in the area any time in the next few months. A concert at the venerable Ark in Ann Arbor Sunday is the closest she’ll come to northwest Ohio on a tour that is taking her to more than 20 cities where she will play everything from 1,500-seat opera houses to intimate 500-seat listening rooms like the Ark.

Scaling down suits her approach to music right now. The show is all acoustic and features only Toledoan Rachel Coats accompanying Bowersox on bass.

“I really like to be able to see the people in front of me and hear what they have to say. I crack a joke and people say something back and I have an ongoing dialogue throughout the show,” Bowersox said of playing in much closer confines. “I want to feel like I’m with them and not above them.”

Her planned appearance in the Broadway production of Always... Patsy Cline has stalled after months of negotiations and stop/start creative differences. She said playwright Ted Swindley was uncomfortable having his two-person play expanded to a full Broadway cast of 12 people and he has pulled out of the project.

She said she is disappointed, but she understands Swindley’s perspective.

“I am both on his side and very disappointed. I understand what it’s like to have the record executives say, ’You have to do this, you have to do this,’ and he had this play that had been successful ...” she said. “It’s just that Broadway is a different beast. It’s a whole world of its own. I was really looking forward to paying my tribute to Patsy Cline on a Broadway stage.”

As always, Bowersox continues to adapt and move forward. She just released a seven-song EP (basically a shortened version of a full-scale “long player” CD or album) called Promises that was funded through the Pledge Music crowdsourcing Web site. Basically her fans paid for the work and are funding her tour, a model that has been utilized by everyone from Birds of Chicago to Rufus Wainwright and Graham Parker and Garland Jeffreys.

“I think it’s wonderful to go directly to your fans and they can give you comments and feedback on what they’re looking for,” she said. “They essentially become the record label and you don’t have to sit with these record executives telling you what to do.”

While she is unfailingly gracious and appreciative of the American Idol experience, she acknowledged that it wasn’t always conducive to her creative process. For example, on the first of her two albums Farmer’s Daughter she was presented 13 songs by Jive Records written by other artists and expected to record it to take advantage of her post-Idol fame.

She and her management had to work “really hard” to convince the label that Bowersox had a body of her own work that she wanted to record and that it was important that she be true to herself. She said she had to balance being “headstrong” with trying to please the label.

She cited the song Hold On, which was released as a single off the album, as an example. She said it is a good song, but it didn’t move her and Jive Records was dead-set on it appearing on the record.

“It wasn’t really a song that was close to my heart and it came down to the business executives saying, ‘Record it or we walk,’” Bowersox said.

So she “killed it with kindness,” doing the best job she could to make it work both for her and her fans.

Unlike Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, or Adam Lambert, American Idol was never meant to be a launching pad for Bowersox to find mainstream acclaim. Instead, she was more interested in a career like that of Bonnie Raitt or Melissa Etheridge, artists who build a substantial body of work while sustaining a career that pays the bills and provides creative sustenance.

“I really wasn’t looking to be a mega pop star. I wanted to be a critically acclaimed musician like my heroes,” she said.

Gone from her American Idol days are her trademark dreadlocks, which have been lopped off, reflecting a choice that was both spiritual and practical.

“My personal life had been up and down and I feel like hair holds a lot of energy and especially a hairstyle like dreadlocks,” she said. “It was time to just let it go, let go of dead weight. They were heavy too. It was like having eight pounds on my head.”

The tour is a stripped down affair in which Bowersox and Coats are criss-crossing the country in a van. The set list for her shows features music from all her albums (her second album, All That For This was released in 2013), some unreleased songs she is planning for her third album, and a handful of covers.

She said that next year she will likely go back to playing with a full band, but for now she is keeping costs down because the money is better spent saving for her son’s college. “I’m a cheapo, I guess: frugal. I’m running a business here and I’ve got costs that I need to keep down.”

Plus, it’s great fun.

“It’s just the two of us ladies running the country having a good time,” Bowersox said.

Crystal Bowersox will perform at The Ark in Ann Arbor Sunday. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased online at theark.org, by calling 734-763-8587, or at the box office. The Ark is at 316 S. Main St.

First Published October 3, 2014, 4:00 a.m.