Her Colby English major helped hone her songwriting skills, and a few talent contests during college paid some bills, says Currie, who has been playing guitar and writing songs since she was 13. But while she attended graduate school at Cambridge University she performed only at the colleges in Cambridge. “I’ve been backstage at big festivals. It’s a lot of schmoozing. It’s a bizzaro kind of life. I felt I wasn’t ready to approach the music industry,” Currie said recently.

In the early ’90s, fresh off a master’s degree in art history and a move to Seattle with her husband, Douglas, Currie pitched into the business, playing her acoustic 12-string guitar and singing at coffeehouses, open-mike nights and occasional small festivals. During the days she was “writing like mad,” feeling more and more confident in pursuit of her passion.

The awards and radio play given to her 1994 CD, No Heroes, got her foot in the door. “Suddenly magazines cover you. You open shows. Your name starts getting out there,” said Currie, who performs in the Seattle-Tacoma area and the Puget Sound islands. “Locally I have a nice following,” she said, joking about “Currie heads.” She also has a Web page (www.inter scapes.com/currie) where she posts sound clips and upcoming shows.

Variously described as “wistful” and “liquid silver,” Currie’s ethereal, haunting vocals, amid penny whistles, hand drums, keyboard, fretless bass, bass guitar, cello and intricate guitar rhythms and chords, recall Scottish and Celtic singers and sounds. Images of the sea, sun, moon, wind and stone turn into metaphors for the heart’s affairs, from deep sadness to transcendent joy. She aims, she says, for the same “thoughtfulness about the writing” as Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, her hometown Concord, Mass., heroes. “So far,” she said, “nobody’s thrown anything at me.”

After promoting her new CD in performances around Seattle, Currie landed a spot in June at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, a showcase for singer-songwriters with its enormous audience of 25,000 people. She also snapped up a main-stage booking at the High Sierra Music Festival in Bear Valley, Calif. That 4th of July gig in the mountains a couple of hours from San Francisco “starts a buzz about your work and amounts to a lot of CD sales,” she said. She’d booked almost every week this summer.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to juggle being a wife and “touring mother” of two young children. To go on the road and hang around in hotels for seven months of the year, she says, would detract from their childhood. “I’m living a normal life so that I can write about a normal life,” she said. “It’s an adventure and a lot of fun. If somebody told me I had to do something else, it’d be crushing. It’s a real passion.”

—Robert Gillespie