Her passion for stories spills out in song

Kim Taylor's dream was to get her English degree and become a short story writer.

There was one small obstacle to that dream, however. "I was a terrible short story writer," she says with a laugh.

Fortunately, the Cincinnati-based artist discovered that what she truly excels at is writing really short stories, set to music -- in other words, songs.

On "I Feel Like a Fading Light," released in September, Taylor tells a series of tiny tales in three- to five-minute increments that conjure landscapes both grand and intimate. The sensual "Glove" paints the singer's passion as being as unstable as an earthquake. The melancholy title track nails the sense of the right choices being just out of reach and the wrong ones close at hand. Throw in her vocals, sometimes girlish, sometimes smoky and knowing, and you have stories that beg to be experienced through the ears as well as the eyes.

"Her songs are these little vignettes. That's what made it so fun for me," says multi-instrumentalist Jimi Zhivago , late of the band Ollabelle , who produced the album.

Zhivago encountered Taylor, who records for her own label, Don't Darling Me, when she opened for the roots-rock collective at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge three years ago.

"Usually I stay in back and hide, but I went to the bar, and you can't miss someone if they're performing if you go the bar. And there she was, and I was just captivated," he says. But initially it wasn't her voice or her songs that grabbed his attention. "It was the way she tapped her foot. She looked like she was really angry at the floor and kicking it really hard. And I was like, 'This girl's got something!' "

Taylor, who was raised in Florida but moved to Ohio a decade ago, says singing and songwriting were always secret passions. Her dad was a big record collector -- Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn were favorites -- and she sang in high school but never considered it as a career.

"It was always sort of this closet thing I wanted to do, but I just never went after it," says Taylor on the phone from her Cincinnati home. "I don't know when I really decided to do it. I think people started saying 'Oh, you sing really well,' and I had a really quiet, shy voice in the beginning and I didn't want to just have a quiet, shy voice, so I really worked on it on my own a lot."

As she worked to expand the range of her dynamics, she also discovered her songwriting voice, which has been influenced over the years by idols including Gillian Welch , Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, and Tom Waits.

"I realize how musical repetition can really convey a poem so well, and Tom Waits is all about that. You just keep the same lick going, but it's all about the story he's unfolding for you. I'm so drawn to that, and I think that's the short story writer in me," she says.

The 30-something, married mother of one is also a fan of Ron Sexsmith , for whom she opens tonight at T.T. the Bear's Place in Cambridge. She is less familiar with the artists she is starting to be compared with as she slowly builds a following, getting featured on National Public Radio and XM satellite radio, and touring with bands such as Ollabelle and Ohio friends Over the Rhine .

"I've been hearing a lot of Cat Power," she says, as well as Beth Orton and Leslie Feist. While Taylor shares a similar husky vulnerability with those women, her atmospheric, alt-country leanings are just as likely to evoke the wide-ranging vistas of Grant-Lee Phillips or the headstrong musings of Michelle Shocked.

Taylor is in no rush to sign with a label. "I would only [sign] to further what I'm doing. I'm certainly not interested in getting into a situation where I'm going to be re-created or remolded or whatever, because I'm already proving that I'm doing it on my own. I have no label and I have no company promoting me to radio. NPR picking me up was completely on their own, me submitting it and they listened to it and liked it and decided I would be the artist of the week. There's been several radio stations like that. So I think that I'm doing so much ground work on my own, I'm only interested in working with a company that is just continuing it."

In the meantime, she's content to keep refining her voice and working on what she calls "my highly edited short stories."

Kim Taylor opens for Ron Sexsmith at T.T. the Bear’s Place tonight at 8:30. Tickets are $10. Call 866-468-7619 or go to ticketweb.com.