Kathy Mattea has one of the most distinct voices in country music over the past thirty-plus years. In 1989 and 1990, she was the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year, and her 1988 hit single “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” won both Song of the Year and Single of the Year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 1988. She has had four single that have hit number one on the Billboard Country Singles and Tracks chart.

She has had a legendary career in country music but over the past several years, her songs have been leaning more towards roots and folk music. Her latest album is called Calling Me Home, which is a collection of cover songs about West Virginia (where she grew up), Appalachia, and coal mining. The album before that, Coal, is the same.

Kathy Mattea will be at the Kirkland Performance Center on Friday night for a show. I spoke with her by phone about the changes in her music over the past thirty years, having a hit song that holds up over multiple generations, and what she has plans for the future.

Your last two albums are Coal and Calling Me Home and they are collections of older songs that you are reinterpreting and singing. How did you choose the songs you were going to cover for those albums?

The Coal album came about because of a big mine disaster. It was a pretty big event in West Virginia a few years ago. I mean, there were a couple, but it was the first big disaster in a long time. Thirteen miners were trapped for four days. Everyone was watching this story. The whole world was following it. I was absolutely riveted to it and shocked by what strong feelings I had. A good friend told me, “Kathy, this is what music is for.” I decided to make an album about coal mining and looked for all the songs I could find about coa lmining. Eventually, I came up with the Coal album, and that took me back to the Appalachian music I heard growing up but no one was there to teach me.

Calling Me Home is sort of a follow up to delve deeper into that.

What I loved about those two albums is that it I remembered when the West Virginian miners were trapped for four days, but haven’t heard a lot about Appalachia since then following the news and being 3000 miles away in Seattle.

It’s interesting. I did have a wave of uncertainty that this would be specific to a certain region and people would be unable to relate to it. But I have to tell you, reading about this big landslide, and then going out on the road and singing these songs, I’m struck by how things can happen and you can’t get answers and lives are changed in a split second.

There’s this kind of sense, especially in my name, where you live with that hanging over your head. There’s so much at the end of the day, where people have come to me and said, “These songs have moved me.” It’s these specific stories that reflect the human experience that we all bump up against. I’ve found it to be very universal, even if the stories are very specific.

That nicely segued into what I wanted to ask you about next, which was your live show. You’re playing in Kirkland this weekend and touring across the country for a lot of the year, what can people expect from one of your shows?

We do songs from Coal and Calling Me Home, and we do a lot of the old favorites, some of them we rearranged so they’ll be fresh for people. Usually I tell stories about the songs and it turns into, hopefully, a musical conversation. My goal is to make you feel like you’ve been sitting in my living room all night, that we’ve told stories and sang stories together, and touched on what we have with these songs.

And I’ll just say that if I did my job right, you’ll have at least one good belly laugh and maybe a tear in your eye.

I did want to ask a little bit about rearranging your songs because the music you’re making now sounds quit a bit different than the country music you were making for the majority of your career.

It’s interesting because we basically have a string band right now. It’s all acoustic and the players are really wonderful. I’m really lucky. Sometimes we’ll take a song and strip it down to just one guitar and voices, or something that was heavy on the piano will give us the chance to think about what it would be like to be played on the guitar, or sometimes we will take a song and play with the rhythm of it, or we’ll break it down and change to a second version and go into a different direction musically. There will be some twists and turns and some little surprises. It keeps it fresh for us, as well.

When I found out I was going to have the opportunity to talk to you, it was a wonderful opportunity to revisit some of your older songs that I’ve really loved and had the chance to revisit. What struck me was that particularly “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” holds up so well today, more than 25 years after it was first released?

I wouldn’t pretend to know. Part of living with these songs is that some of that is a mystery. You find a treasure and you look up twenty years later and you’re still enjoying it and it’s still connecting with people. I think partly that it’s about the love that we all really want: a long, enduring marriage that gets its sweet reward at the end. At the end of the day, I think we all would like to have a connection like that with another person. It’s very simple, but the depths of that connection touch all of us on a real primal level.

Can I ask what you’re working on musically and what you have coming up for the near and distant future?

I have a couple of ideas brewing, but I haven’t fleshed them out yet. I’m really interested in harmony singing right now. I’ve been putting out a few feelers to some people to see if they want to make a record and explore some of that, but nothing’s gelled yet so I don’t have a concrete plan I can talk about.

I’m also starting to delve into writing a book. This has been dogging me for a few years. That’s on my plate these days, and I’m trying to find out how to make it real, as opposed to just something I’m thinking about. That’s me trying to do something that I feel like I’m such a novice at, but I think I’m ready to do it.

{Kathy Mattea plays at the Kirkland Performance Center on Friday, April 11 at 7:30pm, all ages, tickets $45-$65 and available here.}