Not quite two years ago, Emily Rodgers wrote her first song, an aching alternative-country ballad called "Last Call," after moving to Pittsburgh with her friends in local duo Boca Chica. One of seven cuts on Rodgers' first recording ever, an album called "Emily Rodgers & Her Majesty's Stars," it earned her a spot in rotation at WYEP.

		Emily Rodgers Where: Quiet Storm, Garfield. When: 9 p.m. Friday. Admission: $5.

"I got an apartment all by myself and I just started writing," Rodgers says. "I wrote like crazy, 'cause I didn't have a TV, so I'd just come home from work, make dinner and play and play and play."

The second song she ever wrote, a country waltz called "Hell" that references Neil Young's "Ohio" in the lyrics, can be found on "In Spring Alchemy," a split EP with Kevin Finn they cut in preparation for an East Coast mini-tour they're doing late this month.

As understated as the sound of Rodgers' first CD was, punctuated though it was by Megan Williams' haunting violin work, this is more stripped-down and intimate, often just Rodgers alone on vocals and guitar. Her drummer, Andrew Rishikof, has suggested, in fact, that from now on she should cut her band tracks that way and then have her bandmates work around it.

"He said, 'Something different happens when you play by yourself,' " Rodgers recalls, although she's not sure why or what that is.

"People are always asking me 'Why in the hell do you sound like you sound?' " she says. "But it's just how I sound. I don't know what it is."

A major part of why she sounds the way she sounds is tied to how she sings. Like early Michael Stipe, Rodgers uses her voice more as an instrument than a method of putting her lyrics across, to where it would not be a stretch to call her lyrics indecipherable.

"When I first started playing out," she says, "I was so nervous because I didn't want people to hear my lyrics, and then people started telling me they couldn't understand a word and I was like 'Oh, cool.' Now, people say 'I really can't understand your lyrics, but I love it, whatever it is that you're doing.' "

She's been hearing, though, that it isn't as hard to decipher her lyrics on the new EP, which may be good, considering the way she feels about her new material.

"I feel like I've been writing poems lately," Rodgers says. "I think that's probably why I've been into playing solo so much. The first two songs on the CD, those are brand new songs for me and I just think they're more like poems than songs. They're not hook-heavy at all. They're just sort of stuff that I wrote set to music. That's just the way I've been writing, definitely a more indie approach, more artistic than entertaining."

You can hear for yourself Friday at the Quiet Storm, where Rodgers is doing a solo gig with Pittsburgh's own LoHio and a band from Providence, R.I., called Barn Burning whose sound she describes as "a little Neil Young, a little R.E.M."