Young and restless Heartland homegirl Brandi Carlile BY MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG

"I broke my own record yesterday," Brandi Carlile says proudly. "I had eight shots!"

The 24-year-old singer-songwriter isn’t bragging about Jägermeister or Wild Turkey: espresso’s her vice, and she’s obsessed with Starbucks. Particularly when she’s touring. As she explains over her cell from somewhere in Ohio, she and her band mates — twin brothers Tim (guitar) and Phil (bass) Hanseroth, drummer Jason Maybell, and cellist Josh Newman — are on a serious Starbucks watch.

"We’re talking about an extreme caffeine addiction," laughs Carlile, who hails from rural Washington. "But the big thing for me is just that you always know what to expect — it’s that one time where you actually feel like you’re at home, because you go in and the coffee tastes exactly the same, it’s the same décor, you get the same attitude. It’s really calming for 15 or 20 minutes."

Those zen-like time-outs have become important to Carlile over the past year. She’s been on the road most of 2005 supporting her Brandi Carlile major-label debut, headlining small clubs in between support slots for Tori Amos, Chris Isaak, and Marc Broussard. (She’ll open for Ray LaMontagne this Friday and Saturday at the Berklee Performance Center, then join Carbon Leaf on Sunday at the Paradise.)

Her debut offers countrified comforts peppered with a few surprises. Warm, sturdy, languorous folk pop guided by strummed acoustic guitars and a gentle rhythm section with an alt-country lilt are her mainstays, though "Fall Apart Again" and "Throw It All Away" reveal a band who’ve looked beyond No Depression to the sublime guitar lines and tender melodic uplifts of Radiohead and Coldplay. Yet it’s Carlile’s robust voice that commands your attention — as with Melissa Etheridge, Bonnie Raitt, or even Neko Case, it’s gritty, vulnerable, and capable of delivering eloquent lyrics about emotional turmoil, longing, and guarded hope with little fuss.

That voice also imparts a sense of world-weariness you’d hardly expect from a young woman. Then again, Carlile’s been at this for a long time: her first public performance came at the age of eight. As a teen she worked as a back-up singer for an Elvis impersonator, performed her own nascent songs at sports bars and birthday parties, and spent long summer days busking at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Her parents fed her a diet of Patsy Cline, the Judds, Tanya Tucker, and Johnny Cash, and that also infected the tastes of her musically inclined siblings.

"When you have a little sister who wants to do everything you do, it becomes so annoying," Carlile chuckles. "I remember I was 13 and I was so into Elton John — it was my first introduction into the pop world and Elton was the best. I had the top bunk and she had the bottom bunk, and one day I climbed down and looked by her bed, and on the wood frame she had written ‘I love Elton John!’ I was so-o-o pissed, I was like, ‘Elton is mine!’ So I always wanted to do this myself. It was never gonna be, like, a Hanson thing."

A few years ago, she befriended the Hanseroth brothers, who were in the Seattle rock band the Fighting Machinists. The trio began writing songs with Carlile picking up electric guitar and learning to scream. But the twins were more interested in going the acoustic route. Over the course of two self-recorded, self-released albums, they honed their sound, giving Carlile a chance to develop as a singer-songwriter.

"People get in your head: they’d go, ‘You sound like Lucinda Williams,’ and so I’d go out and buy Lucinda Williams albums and start writing Lucinda Williams songs. All I knew was from what other people told me. But I finally got the confidence to start evolving into the thing that I have going now."

Brandi Carlile + Ray LaMontagne | Berklee Performance Center, 136 Mass Ave, Boston | Dec 2-3 | 617.931.2000 | BRANDI CARLILE + CARBON LEAF | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | Dec 4 | 617.562.8800