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The ghosts peer back at singer-songwriter Kat Brock from the alleys and overhangs along the Cumberland Avenue "Strip" when she returns to East Tennessee these days.

Like reflections in a funhouse mirror, they shimmer and stretch through prisms of time and change. She sees them and smiles, driving with the window down, eyes closed as she navigates familiar roads and streets throughout the Fort Sanders neighborhood, pausing here and there to remember.

They're snapshots of who she was -- a reckless young woman, hellbent on raging to the world from a rock 'n' roll stage ... a pleasantly buzzed girl walking arm-in-arm with friends down the middle of White Avenue, unconcerned about anything except the adventures the night might hold ... an emotionally fragile, scared little thing closed off in the upper bedroom of a house on Forest Avenue, clinging to a bottle and praying the numbness it brings descends quickly ... an expectant mother sitting in the window booth of Sunspot, troubled and anxious and unsure of what to do.

She smiles not because those ghosts are no longer a part of her; on the contrary, she feels them, embraces them, loves them in a way she's never been able to before. She smiles because they are just that -- ghosts. Phantoms of a life well-lived and memories of pain that eventually brought about transformation. They don't torment or plague the woman she is today.

And for an artist who's lived so long with such demons, that's a welcome change.

The story of a girl

For those whose sole memories of Brock are of her work in local bands Subbluecollar and Dixie Dirt, the woman who performs on Saturday night, Jan. 23 at The Pilot Light in Knoxville's Old City may very well seem like a stranger. These days, she's as likely to describe herself as a mother or a SportsCenter enthusiast as she is a musician. Music is still the driving force in her life these days -- it's a gift for which she's grateful, she told The Daily Times this week. But no longer does she allow it to define her.

"I think mostly I really have just settled into doing it because I love to do it and not thinking about any kind of end result or getting anything out of it other than the joy of doing it," she said. "I think a lot of that comes from doing all of the work I've done on myself and starting to love myself as me rather than me as the musician. For years, so much of my own self-worth was wrapped up in music. I spent so many years thinking that because I played in a band, anything I did was justified -- I could drink myself silly or act like a (jerk) in a relationship because I was in a band and wrote songs.

"The more I move away from that, the more I've started to like me as a multi-faceted person with lots of interests. I'm allowing myself to get back to having hobbies again. For example, love to watch SportsCenter, and there's nothing wrong with that. I love to watch football and work in the yard and work on my house and play basketball. There are so many things I can enjoy doing that make me who I am, and I've been able to get back to that in the last year and a half. I don't need to make music to feel good about what I'm doing.

"If anything, it's a gift I've been given to be able to write songs, and I love to nurture that gift," she added. "More than anything else in the world, I love to be down in the studio, making songs and being in that space and nurturing that creativity. But now I'm OK when I'm not doing that."

Brock came of age in East Tennessee, taking part in a number of bands that have long been forgotten by all but the most grizzled scene veterans -- bands with names like Mars Hill, Fire/Fighter, Fabula Rasa and Subbluecollar. But it was Dixie Dirt -- formed in 2001, when she moved to Nashville for a brief period and met Dixie Dirt guitarist/keyboard player Angela Santos -- that received the most attention. With bass player Brad Carruth and a rotating lineup of drummers, the band recorded albums that landed Dixie Dirt at No. 8 on the "Best Knoxville Band Ever" poll compiled last year by Metro Pulse. In the beginning, the group was described as an indie-rock version of Neil Young and Crazy Horse; by the time the group disbanded -- for the final time -- in early 2008, they'd flirted with any number of genres, from the languid jazz of "So Good So Bad" to the country-ish "Shined."

There's still a faction of fans in the local scene who half-heartedly hope that Dixie Dirt may one day reunite. After all, the band announced it was leaving East Tennessee for Athens, Ga., in 2003 but never made it; broke up once in 2005, only to reunite a year later. When the four-piece played its final show in April 2008, many in the audience expected it would only be a matter of months before another Dixie Dirt performance found its way onto the calendar of Barley's Taproom or The Pilot Light.

The Kat Brock who returns for a solo show this weekend, however, is a few rungs up the musical evolutionary scale than the sometimes angry, often careless and always intense young woman who fronted Dixie Dirt. And she can't see herself revisiting that time in her life.

"I look at it kind of like my tattoos -- I have tattoos that today I would never get, but I got them throughout the years, and they're all marks of who I was as a person," she said. "With the Dixie Dirt stuff, it was totally me. There was nothing inauthentic about the songs I wrote at the time. I look at it as, wow --all of those songs, all of those times, that was you when you were in a really (messed)-up place for many years. If anything, I want to give that woman a hug and tell her it's going to get better, to just hang in there.

"I'm really proud of the work we did. But now, I can see how sad I was. Back then, I thought, 'This is who I am! I'm a strong person! I can pour all of my emotions into the songs I write!' But I can see now how I was just so sad and scared, and I don't think I have the energy to be in a band like that anymore.

"We were together for eight years, and it was a relationship -- we had so many problems and so many beautiful things, but it was a relationship, and that can be exhausting," she added. "I just don't have that desire anymore. I have my own relationship and a child, my own personal stuff that I'd rather put my energy into."

In search of a true self

To get to where she is today, Brock first had to find herself. And to do that, she had to start by stripping away everything she had layered around her heart over the years, walling it away from the world in hopes of protecting it from harm. The problem in doing that, however, was that no one could harm it more than she herself could. By the end of Dixie Dirt's burning-star blaze across the Knoxville musical sky, Brock was at war with herself, and the heady, carefree days when Knoxville seemed like her own private playground were long gone.

"When I think of Knoxville, I think about just having fun and being with my friends, playing music and getting drunk and having a ball," she said. "I think about having the kind of freedom to walk downtown with nothing on but a sports bra and a pair of jeans. Granted, I was stoned and drunk all the time, but I was completely satisfied and happy and had no responsibilities, and that was my life. But all of that eventually catches up with you, and by the time I reached my late 20s, it caught up with me.

"I had been drinking so heavily and living a life without responsibility -- making no money and not being able to do anything but be stuck in Knoxville - that I found myself pregnant, wondering what I was going to do. And I just had to dig really deep to realize I could follow through with the pregnancy, to be really healthy and getting my (stuff) together enough to be a good mom. And that required getting out of that city where I had lived my life with habit, because I didn't know how to live in Knoxville without being drunk and irresponsible."

In her early 20s, such a lifestyle seemed grand. She vividly recalls going for a bike ride one morning through a downtown that was all but deserted, riding across a pre-renovated Market Square and coming out on Gay Street in the middle of a Veteran's Day parade. The memory makes her giggle -- the idea that she owned the city was reinforced by carefree, chemically charged living and nights spent playing rock 'n' roll. By the end of that decade, however, she found herself adrift -- living in a city that had grown up and moved on while she stayed the same. It was an uncertain time for a girl who had never really grown up.

"I was like, 'OK, the party's got to end, or I'm going to be over, and that's all there was to it,'" she said. "I was already feeling that way before I found out I was pregnant -- I was drinking all the time, and that used to work for me. I could lock myself in a room and drink and smoke pot and not have to talk to anybody and just write songs. And by the end, I was just drinking, and I hadn't written a song in two weeks."

And so she packed her bags and moved west, to Nashville. Dixie Dirt survived the transition, briefly. After it came to an end, though, Brock was back at square one. She was a mother, working on a career in counseling, building a relationship ... but she still wasn't happy. Although she'd suffered from depression for most of her young life, this was something more -- a dark abyss toward which she slipped ever closer to the edge. In desperation, she gave up a number of vices, including alcohol -- and suddenly a corner was turned.

"Because of that, I was able to get off my anti-depressant, which was huge for me," she said. "It was almost like looking through glass, and suddenly the glass is wiped clean, and you didn't even realize it as dirty. It was like this constant white noise, like if you're hanging outside and it's dark, and it feels calm and still and you can hear the crickets ... and then your neighbor's AC clicks off, and you didn't even realize that sound was there. Suddenly you can really hear the crickets and the leaves rustling and you realize how quiet it really is. That's what this past year has been like for me.

"I never paid attention to the small details before because I was so bogged down in my own head. I still have those anxieties, and I'm working on my own issues, but when you take the depression off the top, it ends up being a beautiful existence in that way. I've been able to do things I never thought I could do. I bought a house this year, for example. I feel like I'm a better mother because I'm better able to take care of myself."

Full circle

At first, the thought of making music without chemical enhancement was a terrifying prospect. Angst and anger and self-loathing had been her constant companions for years, and she often drew upon them as kindling for her songwriting fires. Could she find an alternative fuel source, she wondered?

At first, doing so was daunting -- she spent hours in her home studio, composing instrumentals on acoustic guitar but feeling paralyzed when it came time to set words to them.

"Before, I never wanted to write about feeling good because I didn't feel good, and I was so afraid of writing about it and it coming across as cheesy," she said. "I've never been a fan of happy-themed music. I always preferred diving into myself and feeling pensive, and not having that material has been a huge challenge for me. Eventually, I told myself that I just had to put words to what I was writing. I made myself write whatever I was thinking or feeling without caring how it came across. And it ended up being some of the most honest material I've ever done."

At first, she recorded at her kitchen table with a simple four-track recorder. After moving, she set up her own home studio; of late, she's collaborated with Simon Lynn, Dixie Dirt's first drummer and a guy who's been an enthusiastic supporter of Brock's softer, gentler side. They're working on a number of songs for a new album, but in the meantime she's released a three-song EP titled "C." The plan, she said, is to release several similar EPs and to do so quickly, taking advantage of digital download capabilities to make her music widely available.

In addition, she began, in September 2008, creating an ode to Knoxville -- or rather, the time she spent in Knoxville during her 20s. It's called "Roarin' Twenties," in fact, and she's working on three different versions of it -- rough songs cut to four-track to more introspective eight-track versions to more layered, complex final mixes re-recorded by herself and Lynn. The songs tell a story of a young woman's journey -- from the fun and frivolity and rebellion and hedonism of those early years to the pain and fear and scars she carried during her final days as an East Tennessee resident.

In other words, it's an album about ghosts -- those same ones she sees, staring back at her along "The Strip" and from the shadows of Forest Avenue at night. They're a part of her -- but they don't define her. And while she wouldn't change the path she's walked, she'd be lying, she said, if she didn't think every now and then of an important piece of advice she'd like to give to her younger, angrier self.

"I think I would tell her, don't take yourself so seriously," she said. "That's the root of a lot of depression for anybody who suffers from it. You take everything so seriously and so personally, and you're unable to see the world around you because you can't get out of your freaking head. So yeah -- I'd tell her not to take herself so seriously, and not to worry about what other people think of her."