Zooey Deschanel starred in three movies this year, including M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller The Happening. Next month, she plays Jim Carrey’s love interest in the comedy Yes Man.

But one of her proudest projects, she said, has nothing to do with her film career. It’s her band’s first album release, Volume One. The band, She & Him, which consists of Deschanel and M. Ward, was nominated for a Left-Field — or, as the Woodie Awards Web site states, “No idea what section of the record store to look for them in” — Woodie.

In the past, when the Oracle has spent five minutes with an artist, a few questions have been asked. This time, all it took was one question to get the Elf and Failure to Launch star chatting about making music, sharing it with the world and how President-elect Barack Obama’s historic win has been an inspiration to her.

The Oracle: What was it like to finally share your home demos and go through the process of recording the album and releasing it commercially? And what that was like for you, after hiding your music, to then share it with so many people?
Zooey Deschanel: It was really cathartic. It felt really amazing and scary at first.

I would say, like, my first day in the studio, I actually recorded the first track on my record  ­— or the song that ended up being the first track on my record ­— and I was really nervous because I hadn’t really played any of those songs live for anybody. I had recorded them and I sent them to Matt (M. Ward) and then a few select friends heard them and I kept them pretty close to my chest.

So then (we) put it in front of our engineer and then, you know, having people come and then play on the record — it was (sort of) a big hurdle for me to get over. But then, once I got over it, it was so freeing and so cathartic and it just felt like a huge sigh of relief to get all of it out there — and (it was probably) the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.

And it just feels really wonderful to play shows and have, you know, people singing along to songs I wrote. Like, I’m thinking back to when I was there, to when I was (sort of) hiding all of my songs — if you had told me then that that would be case I think, you know, I would have been so happy.

And I mean, I just feel like there are things that happen in my life that let me know that anything’s possible. And, like, for instance, the results of the recent election — I was a big Obama supporter and I thought that was very inspiring, and it’s these things that remind you that you really can accomplish anything.