It’s hip to be uncool

What’s a sensitive singer-songwriter to do?

Just a couple of years back, when Mindy Smith was still “Mindy Who?” and just a promising guitarist and songwriter from Long Island, she felt lucky to be playing for attentive, lyric-minded audiences as an opening act for the erudite rock, folk and Americana elite such as John Hiatt, John Prine, Nickel Creek and the Flatlanders.

That changed quickly, however, after Smith’s debut album, “One Moment More,” turned her into one of 2004’s most critically lauded new voices and went on to sell nearly 300,000 copies. Then, the Nashville transplant found herself singing her songs of almost unbearable vulnerability to rowdy fans of “Redneck Woman” Gretchen Wilson.

“Everything got so big so fast,” Smith, 34, said recently between bites of a bagel at a popular Music Row deli here, part of a vegetarian regimen that contributes to her delicate physique and a waif-like manner only enhanced by her alabaster skin. “It’s tough to have that on you.”

Not that Smith is really griping. On each night of the Wilson tour, her music was is in front of 100 times as many fans as she’d been used to for the five years she was struggling to be heard during open-mikes around the country music capital.

As it was, the sea change for her career created by the success of “One Moment More” ratcheted everything up, not the least of which was going about writing and recording the follow-up, “Long Island Shores,” which is being released today.

“You tell yourself not to be affected, but human nature is otherwise,” she said, often looking down demurely and mechanically fingering the Formica tabletop. “I’m not that sure of myself. I’m not cool, and I’ve come to terms with this. So I’ve decided I’m out there representing all the uncool people.”

Uncool though Smith may feel, she’s joined the ranks of such alt-country-folk hipsters as Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin and Julie Miller. She held her own among impressive company when, as the only artist without a recording contract, she turned up on the 2003 tribute album “Just Because I’m a Woman: The Songs of Dolly Parton.” Her version of “Jolene” (which Parton has called the best she’s heard, including her own) put her in the midst of such musical heavyweights as Emmylou Harris, Krauss, Norah Jones and Sinead O’Connor.

In the new album, she continues mining emotionally difficult territory spanning the death of her mother from breast cancer when Mindy was 19 (the title track) to love that inexplicably vanishes (“You Just Forgot,” the only song on the album that she didn’t write or co-write).

A late bloomer who didn’t even start playing guitar until she was 23, she balances the scales with a love letter to her adopted home state in “Tennessee,” then revels in the sheen of all-consuming love in a duet with Buddy Miller, “What If the World Stops Turning.”

And she exhibits a strong appreciation for ambiguity in “The Edge of Love,” a deft, ultimately celebratory look at the two-sided nature of relationships:

The edge of love is like a knife

Shimmer shines when it hits the light

Just like that it’ll change your life

It makes time stand still

In “Out of Control,” the singer-songwriter, who probably doesn’t weigh 100 pounds even with an electric guitar slung round her neck, sings of the hard road to inner healing in words that would sound equally convincing from the mouth of a much older, more seasoned soul such as Johnny Cash:

The blood is dry and the wounds I hide

The scars are settling in

So I keep the light low and they still show

I sit and count every stitch

Her songs sound as if they’re written not from want but from inner need -- she calls songwriting her therapy and speaks hesitantly of the intensely emotional process that writing is for her. She figures that if it tears her up to write something, listeners will connect. She has created an especially deep bond with fans, who pour their hearts out to her after shows.

“Sometimes people will come up and ask what am I doing, sharing these things -- am I out of my mind?” she says with a laugh, a bit of her native New Yorker brogue slipping out when she’s at her most animated. At times, Smith agrees with them, calling the spot within where she goes for creative inspiration “a pretty dark place.”

“More times than not,” she adds, “people are compelled to tell me about the circumstances of their lives that relate to a song. So I make a point to take a moment to listen.”

The choice of “Come to Jesus” as the first single from her debut album caused many quickly to peg her as a Christian artist, an impression only heightened when they discovered her church-centered upbringing: Her father is a pastor, her mother was the church’s choir director (and Smith’s primary musical influence). After her mother’s death, she attended Cincinnati Bible College but dropped out after two years, relocating to Knoxville to rejoin her father.

Smith doesn’t like labels, musical or otherwise, as you’d expect of someone who names Sarah Vaughan as her all-time favorite singer, Dolly Parton as one of her heroes and such Brit-rockers as the Cure and the Sundays among the bands that shaped her own writing.

The occasional upfront religious reference or image in her songs, she says, is simply the outgrowth of her daily struggle to honor and nurture her spiritual side. “A lot of people have said the song ‘Come to Jesus’ really has been able to help them,” she says, “and knowing that gives back to me, because I’m still healing too.”

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randy.lewis@latimes.com