Monday was a good night for 25-year-old Brandi Carlile.

The young woman with the heartache of Patsy Cline in her voice and streams of casual, mountainous air flickering through her every song was back playing at the Ryman Auditorium -- the former Grand Ole Opry House -- in Nashville for the second time in her short career. The first time she was there, she brought her singer of a mother out onto stage with her. Her mother wasn't along on this night, but the nerves were already building up early in the afternoon, as she peered at the historic building's stained-glass windows from the other side of her hotel room's glass.

"I was totally freaked out the last time I was here," Carlile said. "We got a standing ovation at the Ryman the last time we were here."

Carlile cops to being a classic country "freak," crushing on all of the work of Cline, Johnny Cash, watching telecasts of concerts from the Ryman and even regularly tuning into the television show "Hee Haw." There's country music at the heart of her and her self-titled debut record, released in the middle portion of 2005. She sings frequently about loneliness and the gut-wrenching business of the heart, but makes it all sound kind of pretty.

She grew up in the kind of rural country where the next houses and people are miles and miles away, living in Ravensdale, Wash., 50 miles outside of Seattle. Her companionship turned out to be most of those old country records that her parents had around in stacks. She heard her grandfather frequently sing Cash and Jim Reeves tunes. He loved Willie Nelson and so did his granddaughter. She would sing with the rest of her family at the Northwest Grand Ole Opry just so they could publicly perform these tear-in-your-beer chestnuts that belonged to rural seclusion and the gentle beauty of sorrow. She studied the lives of these singers and memorized them.

"I was extremely secluded growing up," she said. "I lived a much more secluded life than any of them ever did."

She spent much of her young 20s gigging around Seattle with the clear intention of getting somewhere else.

"I didn't feel like I was missing out, living where I did, because I knew I was headed there. I was kind of a busy bee trying to make it happen," she said. "People from around town are always telling me that I worked so hard. We were playing six or seven nights a week somewhere, at every bar or restaurant that would give us a show. It just felt like getting up and brushing your teeth. I can see now that it was a lot of work, but it didn't feel like work at the time."

Carlile just recently finished her new record in Vancouver and it should be ready for release sometime next year. According to the singer, the album has a definite theme.

"It sounds like how we sound live. We have this feeling that a live record should sound like you sound live, but a live show should never sound like a record," she said. "These are all songs that we've been playing on the road for the last two years. I think I did a lot of growing between 23 and 25, but I think the change in the way I see things intellectually and emotionally will come on the third record. We're kind of a retroactive thing right now."