On an October evening in 2002, I found myself driving down picturesque Route 29 with two good friends. Mirah was on tour, but not stopping anywhere closer to D.C. than Charlottesville. And we simply had to see her. Five years later, the singular singer-songwriter with the beautifully delicate voice is on the road again, and while she’s stopping in D.C. this time, I can’t go, so I had to make a side trip to Philadelphia two weeks ago to see her play. I’ve never been one to go out of my way to see shows; I’ve never followed a band around on tour, and truth be told, I tend to balk at spending more than $20 to see a show. Which may be a D.C.-centric aesthetic at work, or it may just make me cheap, lazy, or both, but the point is that Mirah is an artist worth trekking two-plus hours to see for an hour in a tiny little college-town club or the sweltering, suffocating basement of an Philly church with no air conditioning.

I first fell under Mirah’s spell after her acclaimed 2002 sophomore effort, Advisory Committee. The record is an amazing marriage of songwriting and production, Mirah’s deeply personal (though never precious or maudlin) songs meshed perfectly with the sound of Phil Elvrum, the reclusive sonic wunderkind of The Microphones. Elvrum expanded Mirah’s devastatingly pretty compositions from simple and intimate pieces into dynamic and rich landscapes that bore many of his production hallmarks, with booming overdriven drums and imaginative interplay of the left and right stereo channels.

While Mirah has only released one other solo record since Advisory Committee, 2004’s also excellent C’mon Miracle, she’s hardly been inactive. Just as her songs are structured without much regard for traditional form, so is her career typified by a willingness to engage in whatever project or collaboration that speaks to her at any given moment. In 2003 that manifested itself in Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project, as Mirah, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and some friends holed up in a house in North Carolina for a month recording anything that struck their fancy. From chirping crickets to lonesome trains to loose and fun folky songs. In 2004 she collaborated with The Black Cat Orchestra on a series of mostly covers of rebel songs from the likes of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Kurt Weill.

Photo by Flickr user jamieumd8, used under a Creative Commons license.