On Monday, Nov. 12, Lucy Wainwright Roche will perform at The Red Door in Portsmouth, along with longtime friend and musician Rebecca Pronsky, as part of the Hush Hush Sweet Harlot music series. If you recognize the name, it might be because Lucy is the daughter of musicians Suzzy Roche (of The Roches) and Loudon Wainwright III (who recently played at The Stone Church), which also makes her half-sister of Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Born into a family of immense musical talent and fame, Lucy went against the filial grain and became an elementary school teacher. But, the musical impulses in her blood eventually sought an outlet. She backed her brother on a summer tour last year, and then did a string of shows in the UK with her father. She played her first public performance as a solo act in January and released her debut EP, “8 Songs,” in April. The recording consists of Roche playing acoustic guitar and singing a four-four split of original songs and folk covers. Her current tour began in September and will continue, with little downtime, through March 2008. In the midst of her first national solo tour, Roche is emerging as a self-assured singer-songwriter with a growing volume of original material, an inevitable passion for music and a voice all her own. She recently spoke to The Wire by cell phone as she drove through Virginia on a daylong trip from Atlanta to her New York home. 
Between the tour and the EP that came out this spring, it sounds like your career as a singer-songwriter is really just beginning to blossom. Of course, you are inevitably associated with your incredibly musical family, but do you find that you’re now beginning to develop your own unique musical style and voice?
I think that I was very concerned, before I actually started writing and before I actually started playing, that it had all been done already, and that I wouldn’t be able to do something unique enough to stand alone from my family, and even from other artists who aren’t related to me. But, the truth was that once I stopped worrying about that and started spending more time actually writing or performing, it turns out that it’s very hard to be the same as someone else, and you’re sort of hopelessly yourself. So, that works in my favor, because I think one of my family’s greatest gifts is that everybody is really, really different. Nobody really sounds the same, which is great, because if we all sounded the same, that would be kind of rough. It turned out to be not as much of an issue. I feel like, once I got out of my own head about it and just started to act, it took on its own momentum.

You spent a lot of time getting a masters degree in education and teaching second and third grade. Are you glad you got that academic experience before you turned to life on the road, so to speak?
Yeah. I mean, I loved my job teaching, and I also loved going to school. I went to Bank Street College of Education in New York, and pretty much every single class I took was really amazing, and all the people that went to school with me were amazing and just incredibly admirable people. I would definitely not trade it, at all. In fact, who knows, I might end up back at school at some point.

Going back to your childhood and the years you spent surrounded by music and traveling with your parents, was it kind of a conscious effort on your part to do something different for awhile?
Yeah. When I was a kid, I toured mostly with my mom’s band, The Roches, and people used to come up to me after shows and lean down and say, “Are you gonna be part of the band?” And, I would grumpily say, “No.” That was always my answer. But, I was also always surrounded by it. I started to play the guitar a little bit in high school, and I did it a tiny bit at the beginning of college, and then I really just sort of stopped. I had a bunch of years that were very tumultuous in terms of my feelings about performance and music. Actually, the show I’m doing there (in Portsmouth) is with my friend Rebecca, who I went to high school with, and she knew me during that time, where I was really having a hard time dealing with my own relationship to music. So, she’s known me through all of that time, and now here we are doing shows together, which is interesting. But, anyway, I decided that I was going to have a different kind of a life. When I finished college, I moved to North Carolina and lived there and taught there and really just didn’t go to anybody’s shows and didn’t write any songs and never played the guitar for that year that I was down there. Then, I came back to New York to go to graduate school. I was closer to my family members, and I started to get sucked back in.

What was it that made you decide it was time to pursue music full-time?
Well, I had been singing a little bit here and there, and then my brother took me on the road for what was supposed to be just four days, and I ended up staying for a month, in the summer, while I wasn’t working. I loved being on the road. And, I mean, it has to be said that it’s hard not to love being on the road in that context, because he’s traveling on a bus with a big production, and it’s really fun. But, it wasn’t just that. It also connected to a deeper thing. I grew up on the road, and when I was on the road as a kid, it was not in that sort of situation. We traveled in a car, and it was just different. But, I always loved being on the road, and I really found it difficult to go back to work in the fall after that. I went back and taught third grade for a year and had a great class and had a great experience at the new school I was working at, but it was nagging at me. I didn’t—and don’t, still—want to be a teacher who wishes they were somewhere else. I feel like there’s a lot of those, and they don’t usually serve their class as well as others who, their mind is all there, you know? I just think it’s such an important job and it’s such a creative job, and there’s so many places to go with it that you better be ready to show up 100 percent, and I was feeling that I wasn’t in that situation. I decided to take a year off and just see what happened. So, for a year, I just taught guitar and tutored and stuff. That was last year. I went away with my dad in the spring. And then, this year, I’m not tutoring or doing guitar teaching, I’m just doing music. I miss it, though, and I want to try to incorporate it into my touring. I would like to set up my schedule so that if you’re in a town, you can get hooked up with a school and go in and do some sort of workshop or something. I miss being in school, so I’m gonna try to do that.

Although you only had four original songs when you made the CD, you said you’re now overflowing with original songs. It sounds like the music is coming pretty naturally when you sit down to write a song.
It’s so mysterious how that happens. I’m in a car, so there’s no wood around, but I like to knock on wood when I say that, lately, I have been having luck writing some new things. So, that’s been really good. I think I’ve started to relax a little, which has helped. I think, for a lot of time, I was uptight about what so-and-so would think of this song, or what this person would have to say. Now I’ve realized that, in general, people have their own songs to think about. In my life, everybody’s got their own songs to worry about (laughs), so I shouldn’t be preoccupied about that. Just do your thing, and nobody’s gonna think too long or hard about it. That’s really helped. Now I feel more able to just write and do my thing.

The songs seem to have a very pure and pared down approach, just you playing guitar and singing. Do you think that’s where the essence of song lies, in those basic guitar and vocal arrangements?
I don’t know. Last night I was in Atlanta and I went to see The New Pornographers, because I’m friends with a couple people in that band, and they have eight or nine people onstage with them all the time, and I loved it. It was such a great show, and I really like their new record. I’m a huge music fan, and I love things that are both really produced and really simple. I get really excited thinking about the thought of recording some of my songs in a more produced way, but I also feel unsure about what direction I want to go in. When we went into the studio, we started out doing something a little more complicated, and because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted, it just didn’t feel right, so we reverted back to that place. And, in a way, because this is so new to me, I think I’m still figuring out the basics of how I’m writing right now and things like that. In this particular moment in time, when we recorded that, that was the most direct way to get across what I was doing without cluttering it up unnecessarily. I didn’t really know how I wanted it to sound, so that felt like the most direct way to get it out there.

What can we expect to hear at The Red Door? A mix of originals and covers?
Yup, a mix of originals and covers. And, I’m sharing the bill with Rebecca Pronsky, who I’ve known for a long time. She and I will probably do some things together. In high school, we used to sing together a lot, so we’ll probably dig up some of that kind of stuff. I think she mostly does originals, but I definitely will be doing some covers and, hopefully, some new songs. Lately, I’ve been playing new songs a lot more, so some sort of a mix of that.

Lucy Wainwright Roche and Rebecca Pronsky will be at The Red Door, 107 State St., Portsmouth, 603-373-6827, www.reddoorportsmouth.com, on Monday, Nov. 12 at 8 p.m. There is a $5 cover.