By Jimmy Draper

photo courtesy of Sugar Hill Records

Her latest release, The Duel (Sugar Hill), further fuels speculation. Amid its narratives of lost and dejected souls is the story of "Melancholy Polly," a musician who purges her personal demons by singing tortured, heartrending songs – "Safe inside the music and the melody / Polly gets to lose it and no one can see" – that aren't unlike those on Moorer's own albums. The parallel between the two women seems so striking, in fact, that when talking with Moorer over the phone from a tour stop in North Carolina, I can't resist asking how much of her songwriting is autobiographical.

"Let's see – how much do I want to reveal?" she says, laughing, before slyly sidestepping the question. "Ultimately, when you're onstage singing your songs, you're trying to bring people into your world as much as possible. But no matter what you do, it's always your personal condition [you're singing from]. Sometimes you can get too caught up in that, like, 'Oh, woe is me, you'll never understand.' Or you can say, 'This is what I'm doing, and I hope you get it.' At the very least, I just hope people enjoy it."

Fortune's femme

As far as debuts go, Moorer had an unusually big stage from which to bring people into her world. Shortly after releasing 1998's Alabama Song, she performed at the Academy Awards – "A Soft Place to Fall," her contribution to Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer, was nominated for Best Song – and was immediately poised to become Nashville's next breakout star. But when neither that album nor 2000's The Hardest Part (both on MCA Nashville) found commercial success, Moorer was pushed to the margins of the mainstream country scene. "I never really fit in there, anyway," she says. "Once I got used to that, I became a lot freer in my music."

The turning point came in 2002, when she began recording Miss Fortune (Universal South). Forgoing the slicker, neo-traditional Nashville sound of her first albums, Moorer – seemingly taking cues from her sister's 2000 declaration of independence, I Am Shelby Lynne (Mercury) – transformed her third album into an exquisite, genre-bending blend of soulful torch songs, string-laden pop, and brazen, gut-busting R&B that owed more to Dusty Springfield than to any conventional country artist. Unfortunately, the album was a commercial flop.

"When I turned the album in, the label was like, 'Oh, this is a masterpiece! We're gonna work this record for 18 months,' " she recalls. "But three months later I'm having lunch with one of the executives, and he says, 'Well, there's just nothing on it that radio's gonna play. It's virtually dead.' After that, I was actually having a lot of trouble waking up each morning and looking at myself in the mirror. I'd worked so hard on Miss Fortune, and then it died such a quick death. I felt a little bit dirty."

More surprises

Out of that dreary headspace came last year's superb The Duel, Moorer's first release on prestigious independent label Sugar Hill. Grittier and more heavily influenced by Neil Young than her previous work, the album finds her weaving together tales of world-weary characters drinking themselves into poverty, searching desperately for redemption, and staring down futures that promise anything but happy endings. By far her bleakest – and least country-esque – work to date, Moorer says The Duel is ultimately about the absence of faith. "At the time I made that record," she says, "I was struggling with having faith in something."

But things are looking up. Thanks in part to a supportive new label – which finds her on the same roster as Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson – and a phenomenal radio response to the new record, Moorer says her "mental state has improved significantly." Indeed, throughout our entire interview she sounds far more upbeat than you might expect from the woman responsible for The Duel's troubled subject matter. Even more surprising is that she's already begun work on her next record, to be produced by Steve Earle, and claims the new material might surprise fans expecting more of her tear-jerking country songs.

"My music has always been dark, and I think that's been a part of growing up for me, going through all that stuff and expressing it the way that I have," she says, hinting that there may be more explicitly autobiographical content to her songwriting than she's let on. "But now that I'm in my 30s, I'm learning to let go of some stuff. On the next record, I'm hoping to express a little bit brighter side of my personality."

She pauses, then laughs.

"But that's not to say there won't be some Allison Moorer darkness – because I'm sure there will."

Allison Moorer opens for Steve Earle Feb. 15-16, 8 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $26. (415) 885-0750.