"Out West, we come from restlessness."
That's the quote at the top of Alela Diane's MySpace page, the spot where people paste a few words that sum them up. Diane chose hers well. Everything about the singer-songwriter's music - the plucked chords and haunted melodies; her warm, forceful voice; the measured verses about rifles and brambles and shadows - are out of time and untethered to place. Diane is a folk musician, but one who's armed with the intrepid spirit of an indie rocker and a strange, earthy soul, all qualities cultivated in Diane's hometown of Nevada City, Calif., which she keeps leaving.
At 24, Diane has already run off and come back twice. The lure of home is strong; so is the wanderlust she believes is indigenous to daughters and sons of her mountain community's settlers.
"Everyone here is here because somebody came from somewhere else," says Diane, who plays with Tiny Vipers tonight at the Lily Pad in Cambridge. "We're the generation that came from people that had that spark in their eyes, and we always have that desire to get up and go somewhere and do something new. But I always feel like I'd rather be in Nevada City."
That explains how Diane's songs can sound so supremely settled and at the same time filled with portent. She wrote the music on her debut album, "The Pirate's Gospel," in 2003, while traveling in Europe, and recorded the songs in the Nevada City home studio built by her father, who plays in a Grateful Dead cover band. Diane had just moved to San Francisco and had begun performing in public at the behest of childhood friend Joanna Newsom, a harpist and singer then on the verge of indie stardom.
Diane was 20, older than most, when she started strumming guitar and making up tunes. But once the floodgates opened, music poured out.
"I had sung in the high school choir, and with my parents, that's it. But when I picked up the guitar," she says, "it just happened."
In 2004 Diane passed out copies of "The Pirate's Gospel" to her friends. It would be two more years before Holocene Music, based in Portland, Ore., released the album nationally, to wide acclaim, and Diane began touring in earnest. She hit the road as the opening act for the Decemberists, Richard Buckner, Lisa Germano, and Tom Brosseau.
"There's nobody out there doing what she's doing," says Brosseau. "You may see a lot of female singer-songwriters playing acoustic music, but the thing about Alela is she's not hiding anything, and that gives her this wonderful presence in her songs and her performance, and in her life."
Brosseau is talking about Diane's almost preternatural sense of self-possession. Typical 20-something concerns are nowhere to be found in her music. She meditates on the mysterious bonds of family and nature - which form the tightknit fabric of her small-town life - rather than romance and heartbreak. Diane grew up in a musical family with parents who played in bluegrass bands. Ask her to reminisce about her listening habits growing up, and she is hard-pressed to conjure up more than a few names.
"I liked Patsy Cline and Paul Simon. Um, Kate Wolf. My memory of records is spotty. I think that's mostly because my parents didn't have a huge record collection, and that's because they were playing music and not looking for stuff to listen to," Diane says. "My dad [who frequently plays mandolin or guitar with his daughter in concert] can pick up any instrument and make it sound nice. My mom sings traditional Mexican songs now. What I remember is my parents singing in the kitchen every night and every morning."
After her post-high school sojourn in San Francisco, Diane went back to Nevada City, worked at a local cafe for a year, and felt like a failure. So she moved again, to Portland, where she stayed for two years and began work, this past June, on the follow-up to "The Pirate's Gospel."
"I really liked Portland, but it wasn't where I wanted to be. Again," says Diane, "I felt like I wanted to be in Nevada City. So I got the [music] files and brought them down, and my dad and I have been working on it at his studio."
The new collection, she says, has "a few loop de loops." While the essence of her songwriting hasn't much changed - lately, memories and small domestic moments capture her fancy - Diane has ornamented the songs with drums and cello, bass and banjo. She expects to release the album in February or March. Recently back from a two-month European tour, Diane is on tour in the US this month and will return home in time for the holidays - to Nevada City.
"The way the seasons change, it makes me feel that things are moving along," she says of her hometown's allure. "I do more with my hands, more crafting. There are good people here watching out for me. I've reached the realization that it's OK to stay."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/ music/blog.
