Taking singular style for a spin

IT’S hard to characterize other indie rock vocalists as singers after listening to My Brightest Diamond. The delicate vocals are delivered with such immense style and passion, such doting care and control that they make many of today’s top artists sound like novices.

The sheen on My Brightest Diamond is the handiwork of Shara Worden, a New York City musician who is, by training, an opera singer. On “Bring Me the Workhorse,” an album she recorded using a string quartet and a traditional rock four-piece, Worden has simply transferred her talents as a lyric soprano to indie rock, using strings to lace the styles together.

Out Tuesday on Asthmatic Kitty Records, “Bring Me the Workhorse” deftly displays Worden’s classical training, not only as an unusually gifted singer but also as a composer and lyricist. She wrote all the music on the album, which marries the past with the present, combining elements of Debussy and Purcell with rhythmic modern guitar. The resulting body of songs lives on the fringe of the ever-growing freak-folk scene, but it’s more a matter of topic than style. All of her songs have an organic, naturalist bent, populated, as they are, with magic rabbits, come-hither dragonflies and various other flora and fauna. But they veer into other terrain vocally, alternately recalling the fragility of the Cocteau Twins and Antony and the Johnsons and the sensuality of Nina Simone and Edith Piaf.

Worden has what she calls a natural affinity for the “tone, feeling, mood, atmosphere and color” of Vincent van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The beauty of that era is something that is not really cultivated in popular American culture. It’s something I gravitate toward, that sensuality. Not sexuality, but stimulating the senses.”

That affection is clear not only in her music but also in her appearance. Worden’s long, dark hair is swept up in a swirl of pins more common to women cloaked in bustle dresses, and her almond eyes are enhanced with eyeliner. Her simple black-and-white outfit is accented with a fringed, red scarf and matching ballerina flats.

It’s a singular look that, much like her new album, is infused with confidence and conviction. Yet it was only in the last year and a half that she asked herself, “What things do I like? Rather than trying to be like someone else, let me ask, ‘What am I interested in?’ Let me really explore that,” Worden said during a picnic interview at Griffith Park, after picking a dark horse and taking a couple of spins on the vintage carousel.

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Musical roots

WORDEN spent her formative years in Ypsilanti, Mich. Her father made his living as a church music director, and her mother played piano for vocal students, so it was natural that Worden would also play piano and sing, though she wasn’t always confident in her voice.

“For me, the voice has been like wrestling with a big animal. For me, it’s actually been a fear that I couldn’t sing,” she said. “Everyone can sing. A lot of people just stop. I had parents that encouraged me to continue pursuing music, so I never stopped.”

Worden’s talent is the result of years of intense study. After her parents moved to Dallas, Worden followed suit, attending the University of North Texas to study opera. She married shortly after graduating, then moved to Moscow for a year, where she spent her time writing songs and studying the Russian language.

She moved to New York in 1999, where she continued her opera lessons and also formed the guitar-centric band Awry. “But I got really tired of hearing only electric guitar,” Worden said. “I was listening to people like Godspeed You Black Emperor, Nina Astasia, Rebecca Moore. They were all playing with strings in New York, so I started getting that idea in my head that I really wanted to pursue writing for strings.”

For the next two years she studied composition with Padma Newsome, a viola and violin player with the modern chamber ensemble Clogs. Then she set to work on the songs she would eventually record as My Brightest Diamond.

It took a few years. She was sidetracked for a while after meeting Sufjan Stevens, who asked her to sing backup and also tour in support of his critically acclaimed folk album “Illinois.” In September and October, Worden will tour with Stevens again, only this time it will be as My Brightest Diamond, the opening act of his tour for “The Avalanche.”

Worden was recently in L.A., for the most part on vacation, though she also performed her first show here. The small stage at the Echo was packed, with Worden in the center surrounded by a string quartet to her right, a guitarist to her left and a bass player and drummer squeezing in at the back.

The experience was like watching a mermaid, from the moment Worden opened her mouth, kicking off with a barely accompanied Simone cover, to the show’s orchestrated closer. After My Brightest Diamond had finished playing, after the audience had applauded, the room was pin-drop silent except for a few awed fans uttering “wow.”