For Shea Seger, it's all about environments. Getting the lay of the land. Soaking up the atmosphere. Trying on a new skin. She's come a long way in her two decades on Earth, and everywhere she's stopped she's found bits and pieces that help make up The May Street Project, a fine debut that's pitched somewhere between a sweaty basement club and her back porch.

It started in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1980 on May Street, a neighborhood made up of illegal aliens, middle-class families, craftspeople, Vietnam vets. Seger's disabled father was one of them, and his salve was his record collection: Shea grew up listening to everything from Janis Joplin to Pink Floyd.

Later the Segers moved to Quitman, making a house from an abandoned train car. Population 1,200, with 80 percent of families living in caravans, it's Quitman that attracts the journalists' attentions and gives Shea a small-town mystique. Her off-kilter delivery on The May Street Project sometimes recalls Quitman's other famous daughter, actress Sissy Spacek.

Seger remembers the town as a 15-minute drive from anywhere, where the only TV channel showed nightly news and M*A*S*H repeats. Young Shea played with curling irons and wooden spoons. When she learned to write she started doing more of that on days rounded by sunrises, sunsets, star-filled skies, and country music on the radio.

In 1993, Seger's parents suffered some marital discord, and Shea moved in with family in Virginia Beach, Va. She enrolled at Norfolk's Governor's School for the Arts on a scholarship, studying to be an actress. In 1997, however, Shea decided getting into character wasn't as important as getting into herself, and quit.

The next year, she was in London writing songs. Shea had earned her living acting and singing in shows in Virginia, but after meeting Interscope recording artist Kenna, realized she was going to have to uproot herself again if she wanted to express herself. London had rain, museums, dance music, a sense of history, and a vast diaspora of peoples looking for something different. No one smiled at her in the street anymore, but Shea used this isolation to pursue her craft and reinvent herself.

In London she hooked up with producer Martin Terefe. Songs were written; a sound was pursued, crossbred, remixed. The girl Shea Seger became the artist Shea Seger, making the music in her head. There was the country/soul of her dad's LPs, hints of relationships in the lyrics, a duet with hero Ron Sexsmith, all capped with the thudding beats of London clubs and "May Street" itself, a rambling recollection of where she came from. In 2000, Shea signed with RCA and The May Street Project was released.

"I think the major success in all of this is that I did come out of the other side of my album saying something that was a part of me and making it concise," she told hip bible Dazed & Confused in November. "It was only when I could take a step back that I could articulate all that stuff and maybe think someone will want to hear it. Even if no one wanted to hear it, I'd still feel quite privileged to have accomplished the record. If I start bitching about it someone hit me please. Because if it happens, then cool and if it doesn't I'm quite happy to shag and procreate behind a picket fence!"

You've come a long way, baby. And she's only really just begun.