From today’s b, the paper

With a voice that has just enough ache and break to recall Americana angel Lucinda Williams, Carrie Rodriguez surprisingly hasn’t been in front of a microphone for too long. It wasn’t until the classically trained violinist joined family friend and fellow Texan Lyle Lovett for a sound check that her transformation into a fiddler took flight.

Following a stint at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, she was discovered at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Conference by the man who wrote “Wild Thing.” After singing backup with Chip Taylor, Rodriguez found her voice on her debut, Seven Angels on a Bicycle. She follows it with She Ain’t Me, an ambient album that features collaborations with Williams.

So there is a story about how you became interested in violin, and it has something to do with nap time?

Yeah, well, when I was 5 years old in kindergarten, I wasn’t really good at nap time and they happened to be giving violin lessons during nap time once a week, and I remember being out and walking down the hall and hearing these squawking violins playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” and I was so drawn to that I begged my mother to let me take violin lessons at school.

You had in mind a producer for this record, and it’s kind of surprising given your Americana background that you went with a guy who was a Daniel Lanois protégé. How did you choose Malcolm Burn?

Well, one of my favorite albums of all times is Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, and Daniel Lanois worked with … Burn on that. That album just took what Emmylou Harris does and put it out into outer space, so that’s what first drew me to Malcolm. Then I started realizing he produced a lot of things I didn’t even realize like Chris Whitley’s Living With the Law, so the more I learned about him the more I thought this was the perfect guy for me.

You don’t completely ditch the fiddle on this record — it kind of emerges in spots — but you play some other instruments. Tell us about the instrumentation you brought to this album.

Well, I mostly play the tenor guitar on the album, which is a four-string acoustic guitar, and I just started writing songs on these things. I have a couple of them and different tunings for them, and because it’s four strings I can sort-of do things I would do on the fiddle — but on a bigger instrument and it sounds fuller. I also wrote on an electric mandolin called a Mandobird, so I used that on a few songs as well.

Carrie Rodriguez plays live on Morning Sessions at 9 a.m. today on 89.7 WTMD, public radio from Towson University.

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