Darkness invades her dreaminess

Ane Brun has a way with complex feelings

NICHOLAS ROBERTS/THE NEW YORK TIMES''If something is too beautiful, I always try to twitch it ...,'' says Ane Brun. (NICHOLAS ROBERTS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

LOS ANGELES - As Norwegian singer-songwriter Ane Brun picked out a melody on her acoustic guitar during an intimate set at the Hotel Café, she rocked to the rhythm with the relaxed exuberance of a street performer. That's how she got her start, playing pieces by American blues folk artists including Ben Harper and Ani DiFranco on the sidewalks of her adopted home of Stockholm.

It didn't earn her much money, but the experience informed her style, which contrasts an ethereal voice with the raw intensity of a veteran musician adept at drawing emotion out of her instrument.

"I learned to play guitar by playing these songs, especially Ani DiFranco's finger picking," Brun, 32, says during a conversation before her show. "That was the first thing I played. . . . I guess that influences what you make later."

What came later is Brun's unusual sound, bristling with tension between delicate beauty and darkness. Her fourth album, "Changing of the Seasons," highlights Brun's sweet, soft vibrato, a tone Spin magazine referred to as Dolly Parton without the drawl. The dreamy way she sings about self-discovery and the travails of love, embellished with vocal harmonies and lilting strings, give her stark, minor-key songs the air of lullabies fraught with danger.

Such emotional complexity comes across even when Brun, who performs at Great Scott Tuesday, is playing alone with her acoustic guitar, as she did on the red-velvet-draped stage of the Hotel Café. Clad in an elegant black dress with her hair in a '40-style up-do, Brun delivered unsettling, stripped-down renditions of her moving songs. "The Puzzle," inspired by a friend who was dumped by a pop star, centers around a whimsical image of a woman trying to reassemble herself like a puzzle while the chorus captures the disorienting nature of heartbreak. "I walked into love," Brun sings. "I walked into a minefield, I never heard of."

For Brun, this friction between light and dark makes a song compelling. "If something is too beautiful, I always try to twitch it a little bit," she says. "I like things to be very beautiful, but it can't go over that very thin line and become boring."

Brun's friend and frequent producer, Swedish songsmith Tobias Fröberg, says Brun's complex songwriting is what makes her music so captivating. Brun and Fröberg, who is touring with Brun in support of his release "Turn Heads," have traded demos of songs in progress for years.

"She's never cute," Fröberg says. "She's got this bluesy feeling to everything that she does. There is always a blue note somewhere in there, and that's one of the parts that makes it very, very special. Original."

Brun's improvement as a songwriter is due in part to the fact that she doesn't force her material. Some songs have taken her a year to complete. It helps that she releases her music in Europe on her own label, DetErMine Records, so she's under no pressure to rush out albums. And she has learned to trust her instincts.

"When I make a song," she says, "I usually play it so many times that if I get sick of it already when I'm making the song, I know it's not good enough."