Something borrowed

At 28, guitarist Erin McKeown is in the vanguard of a new generation of singer-songwriters who blissfully rummage through America's musical closet, borrowing from jazz, folk music, rock, blues, and Tin Pan Alley. Raised in Fredericksburg, Va., she released her first album, 1998's "Monday Morning Cold," while still an undergraduate at Brown University, where she earned a degree in ethnomusicology. Her subsequent CDs, such as 2005's exquisite "We Will Become Like Birds," display a capacious musical imagination, marked by incisive, almost aphoristic lyrics and a real ear for melodic hooks. Her new self-produced CD, "Sing You Sinners," is something of a left turn. Instead of her original songs, the album offers a canny tour through the back pages of the American Songbook, from a slow and sassy version of Fats Waller's "If You a Viper" to a hard-swinging rendition of the Anita O'Day vehicle "Thanks for the Boogie Ride." She launches a national tour on Tuesday with a two-night run at Club Passim, joined by keyboardist Erik Deutsch, a member of guitarist Charlie Hunter's new trio, and powerhouse drummer Allison Miller, who's spent the past two years touring and recording with Hammond B3 jazz legend Dr. Lonnie Smith. McKeown answered questions from her home in Northampton.

Q After five albums focusing on original material, you've recorded an uproarious CD of, well, not exactly standards, but pre-rock pop tunes. Is this the new direction for you?

A The main focus of my career will continue to be writing my own songs. It's what I love, and I feel it's the most important thing I can do. Doing this project has reminded me of what can happen if you dedicate yourself to creating a body of songs. If they're good enough, they're going to last a long time, and more than anything that's what I want to do as an artist. Collecting and recording these songs reflects what I see as the best of that idea.

Q You found a lot of great material. Where did you discover "Thanks for the Boogie Ride"?

A I found out about Anita O'Day because my grandfather is a big-band aficionado. Long before I did this project, when it seemed totally inappropriate, he was finding me old songs because he'd love to hear his granddaughter sing them. He gave me a CD of O'Day's greatest hits, and that opened up this huge catalog of stuff. I would have loved to have seen her. As a singer, she takes a lot more chances than Ella Fitzgerald. I'm not slamming Ella at all. She's by no means vanilla, but somehow O'Day seems a little more wild to me, a little more unbound, and that's the spirit I wanted to bring to these songs.

Q I can see the affinity. Fitzgerald has this spectacular instrument that you just glory in, while O'Day had a small range, and she had to make all these interesting choices about what she was going to do with it.

A Yeah, I've never been a virtuosic vocalist. I certainly think I have an interesting voice, and it does all the things I want it to do, but I'm not Ella, and if I'm going to tackle these songs, what can I bring to them? I worked on assembling a really interesting musical context, with three other great players who have their own ideas, and finding more obscure songs so my interpretation wouldn't have to be measured against anything else. That was my way of tackling that issue and dealing with my own limitations as a singer.

Q You seem drawn to musicians with a background in jazz.

A Erik, Allison, bassist Todd Sickafoose, and pianist Sam Kassirer all have a certain way they approach jazz, which is not very reverent; educated but not academic, and with a real sense of humor and fun. They have all of that, plus jazz chops, which gives me the flexibility to ask them to do anything. These songs can be played a lot of different ways, and these musicians can go any way I can imagine.

Q You certainly share swing as a lingua franca with them.

A On my four other records there have been more overt and less apparent elements of swing and older music. There's something inherent in the rhythm of swing that just makes sense to me, and has always made sense to me. It's not the only thing I'm interested in, or the only thing I want to write or play, but there's something about it that just makes sense to me on a fundamental level.

Q There's one ringer on the album, your tune "Melody," which blends right into the program and sounds like a 1930s rhythm number. Did you write it to sort of slip it in among these old songs?

A Actually, I wrote it about four years ago as a stand-alone thing, a throwaway. I was being a little self-deprecating, thinking, what is it that my songs need more of? They need more melody. So I decided to write a song about a girl or an idea of melody and how I'd want to get with her. I think I imagined that it would be for a project where I had written 12 songs that were standard-like, but I think as the only original it served this record so much better than it would an album of originals. I thought it would be a little clever surprise.

Q After Dylan and Lennon and McCartney, there was this idea that the most authentic artists were singer-songwriters performing their own material. You don't seem unduly burdened by that notion of authenticity.

A This classic idea of a singer-songwriter, exemplified by Dylan, that's never held much water for me. I like that music, it's certainly part of the culture I grew up in, but Dylan's songs don't reach me the way these older songs do. I think singers today would do a standards record looking for some kind of legitimacy, because these songs are so much older and are Classic with a capital C. I've never felt that pressure, and maybe in the end that's the legacy of Bob Dylan, because I've always felt I could stand on my own as a writer. Why would I choose to do someone else's songs? The answer ends up being simply because I love the music.