It’s getting good

Most musicians who go after a record contract meet either acceptance or rejection from record industry executives.

For an unlucky few, there’s a third option -- acceptance and rejection, perhaps the hardest of all to hear.

“Most of the time I would get, ‘We really like this ... but we can’t do anything with it.’ I got a lot of that,” says Long Island-reared singer-songwriter Mindy Smith, 31. “It’s very depressing, especially when you’re in poverty, sleeping on other people’s couches and you’re barely surviving. It is discouraging, but songs like ‘Come to Jesus’ come out of that, so there’s good that comes out of hard times.”

Finding the good behind life’s hard lessons is a recurring theme in Smith’s debut album, “One Moment More,” a collection of uncommonly moving songs that’s earning the Nashville-based singer a volley of enthusiastic reviews and at least one nomination as “this year’s Norah Jones.”

During a recent 35-minute set at Avalon Hollywood, opening for country-bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, she exhibited the kind of charisma and vocal authority that recall the naked vulnerability of Alison Krauss (one of her musical heroes) and that make such comparisons sound less like hype than fact.

She also dropped in a couple of songs not on “One Moment More” that expanded on the album’s palette of intimate country and folk-flavored material with some saucy jazz and sultry blues touches.

Her harrowing rendition of “Jolene” was a highlight of last year’s Dolly Parton tribute album “Just Because I’m a Woman” and won her the respect and friendship of Parton herself. On her own album, Smith even moves into moody, distortion-drenched rock with the song “Hard to Know,” an outgrowth of her fondness for such rock acts as the Cure and the Sundays.

That eclecticism led her to choose the independent Vanguard Records label over other offers that came her way once the buzz began in Nashville. That was after she’d spent five years playing talent nights and entering songwriting competitions while working a string of odd jobs, from nanny to waitress, or at times not working at all.

“I wanted to be at a label where I wasn’t going to just be focusing on one market,” she says, squishing herself into a corner of a white leather couch backstage before the Avalon performance. “I would much rather have my hands in everything: write a jazz tune if I feel like writing a jazz tune, or an old-style country style song if I want to, or a blues tune -- whatever moves me at that moment. I think that confuses people who don’t understand that about me yet, because people are still getting to know me.”

Smith’s auburn hair is pulled back and she’s dressed casually in a long-sleeved baseball jersey, blue jeans and square-toed brown boots. Her petite frame and delicate features combine with her penchant for crossing her legs and arms into an almost protective posture to create the aura of a waif who’s been hurt once too often.

Indeed, she says, in school, “I was one of the losers. Nobody gave me any encouragement whatsoever, except for my family, and one art teacher who liked me.... I’m still very sensitive to criticism.”

She was adopted as an infant and grew up in New York with two sisters and a brother. Her parents separated when she was a teen, and her mother died of cancer in 1991, after which her father, a pastor, moved to Knoxville, Tenn., to pursue further religious studies.

Smith still feels the pain of losing her mother, which she referenced onstage introducing the album’s title song, which was inspired by that loss:

Tell me how someday you’ll be returning

And maybe, maybe I’ll believe

It’s just enough to see a shooting star

To know you’re never really far

As in other aspects of her life, Smith looks for the good from that experience and finds it in the bonding point that song has given her with fans, some of whom volunteered their own stories of loss during an autograph signing session in the Avalon’s lobby after her performance.

“It’s a huge responsibility,” she says back in her dressing room later, “but it’s good, because maybe [talking about] it can help them move on.”

Smith’s career is moving along rapidly in the two months since “One Moment More” was released. The gently shuffling “It’s Amazing,” which she wrote after the birth of her first niece and nephew, is getting airplay on country radio, while other tracks are gaining favor with programmers at Americana format stations.

She’s played dates with such critically lauded acts as the Flatlanders and John Hiatt, which puts her in front of the kind of audiences most likely to be receptive to her literate lyrics and eclectic music, says her manager, Casey Verbeck.

And although Smith says she hasn’t had much time to sequester herself to do more writing since the album came out, Verbeck isn’t worried about where she’ll go from here.

“She has a repertoire of about 60 songs now,” he says. “She’s a writing machine.”

But there’s nothing mechanical about her songwriting or the way Smith is handling her evolution from Nashville nobody to one of its most promising lights.

Her faith through such times of struggle reflects the spirituality instilled in her as the child of a pastor. She even spent a year at Bible college before moving to Tennessee to rejoin her father after her mother’s death.

Her attitude comes out on the album in “Angel Doves,” one of the most moving pop ballads of inspiration since Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

“I came across somebody ... an acquaintance.... who was really struggling in their life,” she says of the song’s genesis.

“They had lost both their parents in a year and they were diagnosed with cancer and it really affected me. That song’s about where do you find your hope in that situation, when you feel like the world is against you?” she says. “You have to go somewhere else for that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either.”