ONE EVENING IN 1986, in what was then 24th Street's Café Fanari – near York Street, in the heartland of the working-class, Latino Mission District – a timid 14-year-old Mexican American girl named Lhasa de Sela performed in public for the first time. She had long hair and almond-shaped eyes, and she sang Mexican songs and Billie Holliday tunes a cappella, her low-pitched, sultry voice transmitting a passion and emotional complexity well beyond her age.

"You could feel what a raw experience it was for her," says painter and longtime friend Nellie King Solomon, who witnessed one of de Sela's Café Fanari performances when they were classmates at the Urban School of San Francisco in the Haight. "I remember she was self-conscious about her worn-out black shoes – self-conscious in general. But then, when she would get into a song, she'd lose herself in it."

As Lhasa (who now goes by just her first name) tells it during a phone interview on the road, she found herself as well. "[Singing] became the center of my life very, very quickly," she reminisces. "The feeling of how it touched people – that was an amazing discovery."

Soon she was writing and composing her own songs. By the time her first album, La Llorona (Atlantic, 1998), appeared, she was manifesting an exceptional ability to bare the deepest intimacies of the female psyche through her music. "It's my northern star, my guide," she says. "It makes me confront myself all the time."

Now 32, Lhasa is returning to San Francisco for a show Wednesday night, as part of a tour promoting her second album, The Living Road, released last year by Nettwerk Productions.

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"Her style is Lhasa style," says François Lalonde, coproducer of The Living Road, when asked to describe the record. "Sometimes it's a bit like Tom Waits, sometimes Björk; sometimes it's classical music, sometimes it's Latin American music. It's emotive, instinctual."

Solomon likens her to Sarah Vaughn and to "some Portuguese music I've heard," while Lhasa herself puts Mexican diva Chavela Vargas and Lebanon's cherished Fehrooz at the top of a long list of influences spanning Mexico, black America, northern Africa, and the Middle East.

Any of these reference points seem plausible. One can imagine her throaty, melancholy ballads floating out from a small village bazaar in southern Spain, or from a smoky, crimson-hued Parisian nightclub, or a Mexico City cantina. Whatever the venue, as Solomon notes, her compositions have a classic quality reminiscent of times gone by.

Lhasa produced La Llorona at 23 in Montreal, the city she adopted as home after graduating from high school. That's where she met Yves Desrosiers, her other half on La Llorona, and Lalonde, in whose studio, Chez Frank, the album was recorded. An impressive collection of 11 Spanish songs, it quickly gained her a modest but loyal following in the States, despite a lack of attention in the English-language press.

A bit overwhelmed by the pressures and expectations – mostly her own – of being thrown into the spotlight, Lhasa embarked on a protracted escape to Paris, where she performed in a small circus launched by her three sisters, all circus entertainers, followed by a respite in Marseilles. Traces of this period can be heard throughout the new album.

"The Living Road is about the time I spent trying to re-find myself, which is a cliché, but it's so true," Lhasa says. "Sometimes you do something the first time, and you don't ask questions; you go for it. You have no choice. Then all the questions came – all the introspection and all the self-doubt came afterwards."

Both The Living Road and La Llorona convey a sense of life on the road – of vast expanses, isolation, and the introspection and perspective they elicit – that's reflective of Lhasa's early experiences. Born in upstate New York to a Mexican father and an American mother, she headed to Mexico with her family when she was three months old and spent her childhood on the road – her father, a teacher by profession, picked up odd jobs in construction and fruit- and vegetable-picking along the way.

"We lived in trailer parks, people's driveways, wherever we could," she recalls. "We grew up completely without television, listening to a lot of music, and we learned to read at a very young age. It was actually a pretty amazing way to grow up. From the time I was young, I was aware that our lives were romantic and an adventure. Even with the hardships – making friends and leaving them behind, things like that, which I'm still living with in a way – I always felt that in a way I was lucky to live that way."

"The first time we really became stable," she adds, "was when we moved to San Francisco in 1983." Those experiences forced Lhasa and her sisters to find a sense of home in something other than a specific location. According to Solomon, they found it in their creative work, an insight that helps explain the intimate, personal quality in Lhasa's music.

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In 2002 Lhasa returned to Montreal ready to work on her second album, and she called on old friends Lalonde and Jean Massicotte to coproduce, as well as Desrosiers and a slew of other musicians. On The Living Road you'll hear piano and organ (Massicotte), percussion, bass, and glockenspiel (Lalonde), lap and pedal steels, guitar, cello, violin, clarinet, and more. A superb trumpet player, 24-year-old Lebanese Ibrahim Maalouf, left France with Lhasa to work on the project. "I didn't create a band," she says. "I brought in people for specific songs."

The Living Road incorporates not only Spanish-language lyrics but also songs in English and French. "The songs started coming out in other languages, and I liked the songs," she explains. "I wanted them to live."

And they do live, partly through the poetry of Lhasa's lyrics – ruminations on love, death, freedom – accented by a masterful, original sense of timing. Here a word is drawn out, there the briefest of pauses is inserted without sounding contrived, the tempos kept interesting yet uncomplicated. And then, like a thread drawing it all together, there's the mournful beauty of that smoky, ardent voice.

"I always thought of each [album] as a film," she says, "that each one would tell a story, by the words but also by the music. The first one has intensity and a passionate feeling about it, and the second one is more like a voyage. If you can get inside of it, it takes you somewhere. But you must take that step."

"There are so many sparks that pass you by, and you have to reach out and grab them," Lhasa muses. "If it's gone, it's like forgetting a dream. You remember when you wake up, and then you forget it as the day goes by. That's what creativity is all about: grabbing onto those sparks and following them through and letting them become visions."

Lhasa performs Wed/19, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $15. (415) 885-0750.