Something about the name Emily Rodgers combined with the Renaissance-style painting of a woman on the cover will lead people to believe that "Bright Day" is a simple folk album.

It doesn't take long to determine that it's something far beyond that.

When Rodgers makes her first appearance 25 seconds into the song "In Spring Alchemy" over creeping guitar lines and a fog of atmosphere, the voice is chilling and ghostly, as if sung from the netherworld. Listen closely, and we can glean that the voice is a ghost. "Without words," it says, "what do we have?" It's instantly beautiful, troubled and hypnotic, inviting us to enter while issuing a warning that "Bright Day" won't be sunshine and flowers.

It's also more evocative of '80s shoegazer band Mazzy Star channeling R.E.M. than a record bearing a woman's name would lead you to expect.

"Bright Day" is the sophomore album from the Pittsburgh-based artist, who debuted in 2005 with the more folk-leaning "Emily Rodgers & Her Majesty's Stars." This one is her national debut, released on the California-based Misra Records, whose roster boasts such acclaimed indie bands as Great Lake Swimmers, Centro-matic and Hallelujah the Hills.

It was the only label she approached, and she got a quick answer that Misra wanted it. It was produced by Josh Antonuccio (Southeast Engine, Lohio) during two or three weekends at his studio in Athens, Ohio, where Rodgers laid all the haunting vocals on top the music in one two-hour session, sitting in a chair that faced the corner. It was then mastered by legendary producer Kramer (Sonic Youth, Galaxie 500, Sun Ra), who sees something special in Rodgers.

"Emily is a true artist," Kramer says. "She lives it, and she breathes it. Music isn't so much something she's 'making' as something she 'IS.' That's pretty rare in this world of mega-corporations. She's a songwriter in the classic sense of the term. She's not doing this to become famous, or even to be heard. She's doing it because she HAS to write songs, and those types of artists are becoming much harder to find in these success-driven times."

Although her artistry took shape in Pittsburgh, Rodgers has Southern roots, which account for some of the American Gothic feel of her music. She was born in Tennessee and raised in Georgia till she was 5, when her family moved to Elkhart, Ind., not far from Notre Dame. It wasn't a musical family, but Rodgers started playing viola and taking piano lessons in elementary school.

While attending the Mennonite college Goshen, she started turning up at open stages to play cover songs by Gillian Welch, Over the Rhine and other favorites. That creative spark ignited when she relocated to Pittsburgh in 2003, a year after Susanna Meyer and Hallie Pritts, her friends in alt-country band Boca Chica, moved here.

"I think what happened was when I moved here I lived by myself. I lived in Friendship, and I felt really anonymous in that building, just felt really free to make noise," she says, sitting in the offices of Calliope: A Folk Music Society, where she works as a publicist. "Something just opened up, and I felt like the way that I was walking around just changed. I felt like I got more creative. I think I was a lot more solitary when I moved here than I was previously. I got started and just didn't stop."

The first song she wrote, "Last Call," ended up on her first album. The second one, a devastating ballad called "Hell," was saved for the new one.

"I'm kind of a slow writer," she says. "I spend a lot time on the songs. I don't think I have any throwaways."

She started playing the songs out right away, first at Garfield Artworks and then at various Calliope open stages. She picked up accompaniment along the way from violinist Megan Williams and guitarist John Paslov. Early on, she adopted a style not unlike Michael Stipe's, using her voice like an instrument, making some of the words less important than the emotion behind them. (Also akin to Stipe, she's known to have the lyric sheets on stage with her.)

"I guess it wasn't really till I recorded my first album that I really understood that my lyrics weren't easily discernible," she says. "It's not an effect or anything I'm doing on purpose. To me, it's perfectly clear what I'm singing. What I do in general is very authentic or at least I try to make it authentic. Working with Kramer, I said, 'Do you want me to send my lyrics to you?' and he said, 'I just want to hear what I hear and get what I get out of it.' Some of the quieter things, you can hear the lyrics a little bit easier. Some of the louder songs, especially, I'm just trying to sing long notes that aren't even words."

"Bright Day" turns out to be a sadly twisted title for this often heart-wrenching record, which tries to find the light in the face of early mortality and the spectre of madness. It's dedicated to her brother Daniel, who died three years ago at the age of 22. "It really is a lot of what the record is about," she says, and we pick that up in lines such as "The sky has opened up and carried him away."

The lovely centerpiece of "Bright Day" is "Hurricane," subject of a video by Kramer's 17-year-old daughter, Tess (who took a summer workshop with Jesse Dylan, Bob's son). The video depicts the ravages of a hurricane with old film footage, but the mournful song is really about the emotional wreckage of a broken relationship.

"It's like drowning in the dark and fading into black," Rodgers sings in a deathly monotone, before revealing, "I am willing to be saved."

Rodgers refers to the video as a "physical interpretation of a metaphorical disaster."

"I often have trouble talking about what the inspiration is or what the song is about, 'cause I think I write sort of piecemeal," she says. "Lots of the lyrics are a sort of found art. Metaphors for what I 'literally' mean, words culled from signs posted on restaurant windows. A friend once compared my writing process to William S. Burroughs and the 'cut-up' technique of writing he liked to use. For me, I pick up bits of things and put them together in a way that becomes meaningful as it's being written.

"Even on a different day it can mean something different to me. When I'm singing there will be one stanza in my mind that very clearly is about a specific time in my life or a specific relationship, but in the next stanza it reminds me of something else or I'm recalling something else as I'm performing it."

It doesn't come without a sly, subtle sense of humor, as on "Hurricane" where Rodgers manages to make her second Neil Young reference on "Bright Day," while also alluding to his onetime nemesis Lynyrd Skynyrd.

But the brightness is clearly hard fought till the end.

Over a funereal jangle, she declares on the closing song, "You have faith and you believe/Well, I have dread/I have dread/I have dread ... But the sun is coming out on this here town."

Her Southern soul emerges in the way she lingers over "here" as if singing that one little word and making it beautiful will bring her comfort.

The snarl of feedback at the end says otherwise.

Rodgers says that when she first started with these musicians -- guitarist Erik Cirelli, drummer Paul Smith and bassist Allison Kacmar (replacing Austin Osterhout, who played on the record) -- there was a sense that she was the singer-songwriter and they were support.

"I think now we're definitely more band-ish. We're definitely louder, which I like, 'cause I feel like I can crawl inside the song and just be there. The band is based around my songwriting and around my vocals but that's not all there is, like I feel like we have a certain R.E.M. vibe at this point."

She credits the band for allowing her to dig more deeply into the songs.

"It's nice to have even a rhythm section that's really sensitive and emotionally plugged into the music and I feel like we're really on a wavelength together. I feel like they're supporting the song, like I can disappear into it because I can trust them. I don't feel like I need to make eye contact all the time. I just love when I sneak a peek at Paul, the drummer, and he completely has his eyes closed and he might as well be singing."

The name on the cover says "Emily Rodgers" (even if that's not her picture), but it's organic enough that it could very easily be the name of a band, which is often easier to market. Rodgers says Misra didn't really have an opinion on it, and she didn't think about it all that much, figuring it was her second album and the first one had her name on it.

The way Kramer sees it, "It's Emily all the way. The band is articulating her own very personal vision. It may become more of a band as time passes by, but when I was mixing this great little collection of songs for her, the line from my mixing lab was drawn straight to Emily's heart."

Apparently, he went straight to it, because Rodgers says that she considers herself to be a perfectionist and the fact that she's happy with it is a pretty big deal.

"The sound I'm getting now is just what I like listening to in other people's music," she says. "I'm really proud of the last record, too, but this one sounds like something I would listen to over and over again ...."

And we'll have to listen multiple times as well to delve into the dark dreams and haunted mysteries of a "Bright Day" that is troubled from the first note to the last.

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