Strolling along a Paris boulevard on a winter evening, Alela Menig is explaining how lucky she is to have made it this far from northern California. The night before her flight to Europe, she confides, she was driving home with a couple of friends when she wrote off her car in a crash. “Head-on collision. . . with a bear.”

She recounts the tale as if it’s an everyday occurrence in her home town, the inconveniently named Nevada City. Neither a city nor in Nevada, the former gold-rush town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains boasts a population of only 3,001, many of them artists and hippies, descendants of the prospectors who travelled there in search of riches in the middle of the 19th century.

Today’s thriving community of artists includes the hippie harpist Joanna Newsom, the avant-garde minimalist composer Terry Riley and the Beat poet Gary Snyder. The one most likely to strike gold in 2009, however, is the 25-year-old singer-songwriter who records and performs under the name Alela Diane.

Her home-made debut album, The Pirate’s Gospel, was Rough Trade’s best of 2007; last year’s Headless Heroes side project found its way onto discerning end-of-year lists; and her next solo album, To Be Still, should spread the gospel of Alela Diane to a growing flock of disciples.

She’s already a star in France, where she has been performing with two of last year’s brightest breakthrough stars, MGMT and Fleet Foxes, having sold more than 40,000 copies of The Pirate’s Gospel there. Recorded in her father’s home studio, accompanied mainly by her own primitive acoustic guitar and various friends and family, it’s notable for her remarkably fluid voice, with a countrified curlicue on the high notes, and a set of sad songs with lyrics steeped in nature and tunes you can’t get out of your head.

Yet it’s like a preliminary sketch compared to To Be Still, which colours in Alela’s sound and amplifies her folk and country influences with a palette of fiddle, mandolin, banjos, bass, drums and cello. Somehow, she’s done this without losing any of her authentic backwoods charm, thanks to lyrics inspired by the “deep woods and winding rivers” of northern California — a place evidently far removed from the sun, sea and sand of the state’s southern coastline.

“Nevada City’s a small town, surrounded by lots of lakes and a beautiful river, where it snows in the winter,” explains the delicate, doll-like Alela (that’s “a-LEE-la”), who has something of the air of a small woodland creature. “Not as small as Twin Peaks, but kinda creepy in that way. Everyone’s connected. It’s a gold-rush town that’s hanging onto the fact that it was the biggest town in California in those days. You walk down the main street and it looks pretty much the way it did in 1840.”

Alela grew up immersed in nature and the sound of music, her musician parents harmonising from morning to night: “I’d wake to hear their songs,” she recalls, fishing in her handbag for a caffeine-free redbush tea bag, “and I’d fall asleep to them.”

Mom, Suzanne, played bluegrass; dad, Tom, a dental technician and now a regular member of her band — liked to mix his folk with guitar wig-outs and formed his own Grateful Dead tribute band, the Deadbeats. Through her California-born parents’ Scottish and German roots, Alela acquired a deep love of folk music from both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a particular penchant for the late singer-songwriter Kate Wolf, who remains a big influence.

Family comes first, though.

“My mom has an amazing voice, so I think I was inspired by that,” she says. “Her and my dad would be playing guitars around the kitchen, and they sing great harmony together. That played a great role in why I do what I do. They were always playing their own music and old folk songs.”

Yet it was only when they split up, soon after Alela had left home and gone to college in San Francisco, that she took up music. Her parents’ separation came as a big shock and Alela responded by pouring her feelings into song. After cutting her teeth with a friends-and-family-only collection called Forest Parade in 2003, recorded only two months after she first picked up a guitar — “And I think it sounds like that!” — she self-released The Pirate’s Gospel, a collection of “super-sad songs” inspired by her feelings of loss and abandonment. “For me, it’s like this sentimental, heart-wrenching thing,” she says. “The songs were mostly written about my parents getting a divorce. They sold the house I grew up in, and suddenly I was uprooted from everything and just left with some songs.

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