While she's captivated by Virginia, Rana says Boston will always feel like home to her. Aside from growing up visiting her grandparents and other relatives there, Rana lived in Boston for nearly 11 years. She moved to the city for college, and graduated from Wellesley in 1996 with a degree in art history.

“I'd been there for so long and I'd never been a songwriter out of Boston, really,” she says. “It had always been the context of everything I'd been as an adult, and I thought it was probably time for a change.”

“I was approaching writing the same way: getting heavy-handed with the metaphors,” Rana recalls. “I was doing things that had worked in the past but I wasn't necessarily feeling as inspired as I had.”

She wanted to see what else lay within her. What she found was brand new to her, with different chords, music and lyrics. “I was saying things I'd never heard myself putting down before,” she says, adding “I was thrilled.”

So Rana went about collecting new material. When she wrote “Little Did I Know,” the first song on her latest release, she says, “I knew then I was done. It was the last line I needed.” Two weeks later she was in the studio recording.

And now that her new CD is out Rana says she's ready to get on the road and do some shows. Her main stops have typically been in the metro D.C. area and her old stomping grounds in Boston and Atlanta but Rana has plans to add dates in new locales this summer.

While she suspects that the average listener won't perceive a vast difference in sound, Rana describes her new music as “more open, freer.” She notes: “It was a chance to really push myself to express the same sort of power but on different terms.”

Rana reads a lot of poetry, particularly the works of Pablo Neruda and Rumi. “Taking mundane words and putting them into a sentence and having them be the most unbelievable thing you've ever heard,” is what she admires most about the two craftsmen. “It's a discipline, to not allow yourself the freedom of a lot of sentences and a lot of words.”

When asked about other influences, Rana says: “I've never shied away from anything. I love really honest musicians, no matter what the instrument is. To really no longer have it be just an instrument but an expression of them is so fantastic to witness.”

“And it's not just in music,” she adds. “Anywhere that comes, I'll take it. I love it.” Rana says she finds inspiration practically everywhere. “It's making sure to stop and watch the sunset when I come home,” she says. “That will do more to inspire the next song I write than anything else I can do.”

The latest material Rana has been working on for a future release is “a bit jazzier, with a more bluesy feel to it.” It's a sound that will require a fuller band. But for now she's sticking to sparsely delivered introspective songs, usually about being in love or out of love or apathetic to love.

According to her, all her songs are autobiographical on some level. “At the most extreme, I didn't quite have enough drama in my own life,” she says, “but I could see how it could have gotten more dramatic, so I might take it up a notch.”

She says the only times she's written about someone other than herself or a significant other is when she has written songs as gifts for friends. “Being You,” the song that closes New Like a Stranger, was written as a tribute to a lesbian icon rather than a personal friend.

It started as a simple exercise—Rana challenging herself to write a happy song. “I definitely want for happy songs. Even if it's a happy topic, there's always some level of not happy,” she says of her standard fare. So she wanted to “mirror the essence of someone who's good at being purely happy, somebody who can affect people in a positive way.”

“When her talk show went crazy,” Rana says of her subject, “and everyone was talking about how happy they were, I thought, that's really fantastic.” So far Rana hasn't heard back from Ellen DeGeneres about the CD she sent her or the song she wrote for her, but racking up a mighty collection of Emmys is likely a more-than-full-time project.

Get tour and cd information at echoesofrana.com.

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