Jolie Holland's hypnotic mix 

Too often when they take roll call for top Americana songwriters these days, Jolie Holland's name tends to be an afterthought.

It shouldn't be. But then the Texas-born songwriter with the hypnotic vocal style and literary bent transcends that genre's narrow strictures anyway. While her peers seem content (or duty-bound) name-dropping Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music for street cred, Holland's songs could have been included in the Anthology (which covers the 1927-1932 era) and -- modern instrumentation and recording aside -- few would have been the wiser.

Some writers have even dubbed her music "parlor rock," suggesting that Holland's mix of folk, blues and early jazz influences, and her time-capsule voice -- a spectral blend of Billie Holliday inflections and Bessie Smith brass that swallows consonants and makes vowels elastic -- predates our info-overload, entertainment-junkie world. It belongs, instead, to a time when people gathered around the wireless and let their imaginations flesh out the stories.

Holland's narratives are probably too impressionistic and have too much modern sensibility to them to be designated such era-specific relics, but her songs are definitely best met on their own unhurried, pre-rock terms. (One commentator has suggested Holland's music is more "a place that I go" than a recording.)

Creative Loafing never caught up with Holland -- who plays the Double Door Inn this Tuesday -- for an interview, despite three weeks of record label back-and-forth. But from piecing together interviews surrounding her latest release -- last year's The Living and the Dead -- and her three prior solo records, time obviously plays a central role in Holland's songwriting.

"I love records that change over time," Holland has said. "I love records where you hear a certain song and you're like 'I don't even know if I like that song,' and it ends up being your favorite song."

Holland's music certainly rewards repeat listens. It may border on cliché to call her a songwriter's songwriter, but there's no denying her appeal with other tradition-friendly musicians. It was Tom Waits, after all, who nominated Holland for the prestigious Shortlist Music Prize and helped get her self-recorded demos released (2003's Catalpa) through his label, Anti-. ("He's my invisible fairy godfather 'cause I've never met him," Holland has joked.)

She's also collaborated with M. Ward and Marc Ribot, and is joined on this tour by the iconoclastic Will Oldham, who'll be singing backup in Holland's band. (Folk legend Michael Hurley will be opening several dates for Holland later in her tour; bandmate Matt Bauer opens the Double Door gig).

Though each Holland release tilts toward different areas of the American Songbook, the songs typically unfurl in graceful tempos and are rich with historical allusions. Holland's just as at home transposing a 600-year-old traditional ("Mad Tom of Bedlam") and putting a William Butler Yeats poem to music ("Wandering Angus") as she is singing to Beats legend William Burroughs ("Mexico City"), writing about an addiction-damaged friend ("Corrido Por Buddy"), or dedicating a song to New Orleans' Ninth Ward in Katrina's aftermath ("Palmyra").

"Even if it's not explained, I like writing stuff that's grounded in reality," Holland told QuietColor.com after the release of The Living and the Dead. "There's this kind of weight when you put real stories in, there's a rootedness."

Notions of "rootedness" are especially appealing to those who've lived nomadic existences. That certainly describes Holland, who has even called herself "a compulsive wanderer." Born in Houston, Holland was proficient on several instruments by her teenage years and says she wrote her first song at the age of six. After moving to San Francisco and playing in bands there in her teens, she moved to Vancouver and co-founded the neo-traditionalist folk outfit The Be Good Tanyas in 1999. She's also lived in Austin and New Orleans, and you can hear all those places in her songs.

Holland contributed songs to The Be Good Tanyas' 2001 debut, Blue Horse, and played on their sophomore effort, 2003's Chinatown. But the band members were obviously headed in different directions; Holland had already left the band in 2000 and returned to San Francisco. She even swears she's never listened to all of Chinatown.

"I like a lot of the stuff that they do, but ... I don't know," Holland told one interviewer. "I feel really distant from the work I did with them."

Holland's releases since then certainly suggest those different directions, though her early solo career benefitted from the collaboration. As good as they were, when the demos that eventually comprised Catalpa made the rounds, they generated momentum in part because of her previous BGT connections. But Holland wanted to extend her sonic palette beyond the BGT's standard traditionalism, and says she felt constrained in that the BGT's would often rehearse a song for a solid month before playing it live.

2004's Escondida was Holland's first proper in-studio solo production. The songs rambled wonderfully all over the stylistic map, held together by Holland's voice and her penchant for "spooky American fairytales." Springtime Can Kill You followed two years later, a song-cycle written during a dark, post-break-up period for Holland. The songs reflect that, but were delivered in a lilting, jazz-inflected manner with piano parts that expanded Holland's range into swing and Tin Pan Alley '30s-style pop. And with last year's The Living and the Dead, which was co-produced by Shahzad Ismaily (Waits, John Zorn) and recorded with a host of Portland's brightest lights, Holland finally felt comfortable enough to write what for her is probably as close to a trad rock 'n roll record as she'll get. "I love rock 'n' roll," Holland says, "but I think it was hard for me to trust its motives until now."

That record, though, is first and always a Holland vehicle, where contrasts provide the drama: spectral and substantial, dark and joyous, modern and familiar.

"They're all dark, though," she once told a Dutch journalist of her songs. "I think happy endings are boring for songwriters. That's why people tell stories ..."

Jolie Holland plays the Double Door Inn Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 8 p.m.; Matt Bauer opens. Tickets are $10.