It is, all in all, a very Meklit Hadero kind of day.
“It has a lot of everything, which is kind of what my life is like,’’ Hadero says. “I have a lot of variation in my days and I love that. It comes back to that feeling of multiplicity that I’m always trying to explore in my music.’’
Hadero is speaking from the idyllic setting of Big Sur, having played a festival at the Esalen Institute. The location emblematizes a certain new age California that is very different from Hadero’s day-to-day milieu in San Francisco’s Mission District, where she helps run a grass-roots venue, the Red Poppy Art House, and works with immigrant and low-income communities.
A Yale political science graduate, Hadero, 31, moved to the Bay in 2004 and proceeded to immerse herself in the arts scene. She wrote her first song, she says, in 2005. But she quickly found her place, growing a local reputation before her album lifted her onto the national scene. She makes her Boston debut Tuesday at Johnny D’s.
Her thoughtful lyrics and the spare, direct feel of her album - a few string passages are its only ornamentation - inscribe Hadero in a tradition of singer-songwriters who are moved above all by a sense of purpose.
“I cannot sing something I don’t believe in,’’ she says. “Not believing in terms of ideology, but believing in the world that you are making through the song. I feel I get that from the songwriter tradition. The lyrical unfolding is so important in my music.’’
A student of the greats like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, she reserves special affection for Leonard Cohen, whose oeuvre she discovered through Nina Simone’s version of “Suzanne.’’
“It’s the way he tells stories and the way he is so surprising in the openness that he makes with his lyrics,’’ she says of Cohen. “Even seeing his songs age, and how they are still so true.’’
