SFBG: Interesting that you say it's about amusing yourself.

KM: It's about the ways you amuse yourself and hopefully you amuse the audience, too! That’s the weapon you're working with. There are all kinds of conventions - that’s what fun about performing. If you're in a hair band, you arm yourself with hair and kkkkkeee! And there are the conventions of girl singer-songwriters... you can play with the expectations of the audience and that they think they're going to see from you. I'm probably not as funny as a standup comedian though.

That's kind of my theory about art - everybody can tell if the person is interested in thing they're doing or just trying to please somebody. I think somebody seems like a poseur if they're not really interested in what they're doing. I get a kick out of [performing].

SFBG: How does that apply to making records?

KM: They're really different, y'know. I think there are different angles of intimacy - there are different things you'd say if you're by yourself making a song, if I'm on the floor and stretching and singing to myself and making something else. I'll just approach different parts of myself, not that they're more true or less true. It's more of a private kind of truth. I think privacy is really important for generating ideas. I think the two [approaches] are really symbiotic: going in front of people and going back under sheet and popping out and coming back forth.

SFBG: I remember seeing you perform at Bottom of the Hill with Little Wing.

KM: That was definitely a performance piece. I was acting like a character and telling things from a point of view. I called it an opera in terms of the songs used to drive the story. It was my third album.

What I really loved about that performance was that people who didn’t really know about me could think here's some girl who just talks a lot. Then people would realize, "Oh, yeah, she's telling a story - obviously that’s not just her," when they paid close enough attention.

In the context of a rock venue, people were expecting me to play songs, as opposed to being a girl who didn’t really know how to play a guitar, and my guitar playing wasn’t really good. Making up stories that aren’t exactly the truth and talking about what is true is a fun way to do it.

SFBG: How did you get into making music in the first place?

KM: I went to Evergreen College. It's anybody's guess what kind of school it is. I think the best example is that Matt Groening went there and decided he was going to do a 20-year-long prime time animated TV show, which never existed before. It's a really good place to make things. I did adult puppetry and kinetic sculpture and kinetic sculpture storytelling.

It's in Olympia, Wash., and there was this amazing indie music scene going on there through the '80s and '90s. All these really great bands were there, and this huge sense of you can do anything you want to. So I watched people perform, Calvin Johnson and Some Velvet Sidewalk - I remember watching Al perform. I was in high school. My cousin Bret Lunsford - the cute brunette one - was in Beat Happening.

I went to the show and I was a really square Catholic school kid. I remember watching some girl dancing: she had short blond hair and she looked like a dyke, but a short-haired '90s dyke - and she was shaking her head so hard. And I was just staring at her. But seeing Al onstage, standing at a right angle, when he was on the stage. And jerking his mic stand around really slow. It really blew my mind, and it was just abounding in Olympia there. It's in the water - it really was. The notion that you could do whatever you wanted at all - with the stage in particular - was so strong. It even influenced someone as uninterested of being onstage as myself. I played and liked it and thought it was a pretty great way to express myself .

SFBG: What was your first show?

KM: My friend had a talent show, my friend. My brother had been given a ukulele for Christmas when we were kids - I found it or just got another one. I wrote a song on the ukulele. I was telling some friend about it and I said, "I'm going to write a glove ballad." So I wrote this supercheesy song about a girl loosing one of her gloves - a stupid metapho.

Actually me and Mirah were hanging out and talking about our old stupid songs.

SFBG: What's your stupidest song?

KM: "You and Me and Our Bad Sex." That was pretty bad. Another was "The Most Dangerous Man in Olympia." Everybody has got to write some pretty bad songs. My first show was in a coffee house, and then I did a puppet show. For the second one, I played some songs in downtown Olympia, and I realized I didn’t have to have stage fright. I saw it as an option and got over it. This was in 1995.

SFBG: How did your last album, Paper Television, come to be? It's such a great pop record.

KM: Totally. The design of it was to be pop music. Jona's so great at making beats, and I felt like, with our production, we had the facility to do that together. It was easy to focus to make simmered-down pop.

SFBG: How did you hook up with each other?

KM: The Northwest isn’t so big, and we ran in generally similar twee circles. We’re just generally friends, and his old friend Steve Schroeder has this label States Rights Records - they put out our first album. And we both played What the Heck Fest.

SFBG: Will you two be working together in the future?

KM: Every project has a different intention, and I'm not really interested in doing the same exact thing again - because to me, I didn’t grow up wanting with all my heart to be a musician. At that time we kind of crested this collective wave of people who were thinking about how rad it was to be part of the mainstream. In the future, it's probably not going to be the exact same thing again. I don't know. I just got back from two months of touring and my girlfriend's sister just got married and then we moved - and now I'm literally moving as I talk to you. I haven’t had time to think about the next thing! I have some things up my sleeve. But they're still in that tender state where I'm not ready to talk about it.

For a long time I wanted to ghost-write a song for Britney Spears. But somebody fucking did it: "Give Me More"! Now I'm aiming for someone else like Enrique Iglesias, Nelly Furtado. I think the model I'd be following is Carole King or something...

The Blow coheadlines with Mirah. High Places opens Jan. 22; Cryptacize, Jan. 23. Jan. 22–23, 8 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750.