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She doesn’t go into specifics, but it’s clear from her story that singer-songwriter Kimber Cleveland could have gone the other way.

Growing up in Virginia, music was her refuge during dark times. Her earliest memories are of the melodies in her head, springing unbidden from a heart torn between a longing for security and a desire for escape. She was creating it as soon as she could form words, and like she’s fond of pointing out, there really was no alternative for her future.

“I don’t think I ever made a choice to play music,” Cleveland told The Daily Times this week. “It was just a gift to me. Even as a little kid, I would hear a phrase and immediately, in my mind, I would attach a melody to it. I wasn’t trying to — it would just happen. It was just that certain words or phrases or maybe something someone said would just stick in my head, and I would have a melody running through my head with it.

“I started putting pen to paper before I started playing guitar. I guess I was writing poetry, but I never looked at it as poetry. I just liked the sound of certain words together, and it was about getting my feelings out on paper. I had a really difficult childhood, and it was how I dealt with a lot of negative emotions — things I really couldn’t say to anyone growing up. I didn’t really have an outlet for those feelings, and writing really helped get those negative emotions out.”

The writings of her younger self, she acknowledges, are dark. So to hear the music she plays today in her adopted hometown of Nashville, as well as in clubs, restaurants and bars throughout East Tennessee, it may come as a surprise. The diminutive beauty strikes a remarkable presence, both fronting a full band with a powerful pop sound, or drawing listeners into a world of serenity and contemplation when she’s armed only with an acoustic guitar.

Like the artists who inspired her — women like Suzanne Vega and Melissa Etheridge and bands like The Pretenders and Tears for Fears — she takes what could very easily be fodder for songs about dark nights and lost souls and mines those themes for a thread of light. Listeners come away from her performances feeling like they’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who illuminates life’s path with a little bit of hope, wonder and joy.

For Cleveland, that role has been a long time coming. She’s been in Nashville for almost a decade, and she’s been working on her new album, “Comin’ on Strong,” for a year and a half — and she’s just now finding that traveling her own path is exactly where she’s supposed to be.

“I feel like I’m a lot closer to knowing who I am as an artist,” she said. “I can listen to certain things I’ve done now and go, yes – that’s me, right there. I think what I bring to a lot of my lyrics is the part of me that, as a child, wrote in a very dark way, but I have a very dark sort of humor or a very tongue-in-cheek way to some of my songs. At the same time, I’ve become a very positive person. I’ve combined a lot of that.

“I’m just more aware of things and not making choices out of ignorance. With any art, if you can begin without the idea of who’s going to hear this or who’s going to see this – which is the way it started when I was a kid – that’s the place to start. And to chip away at that, you’ve got to apply the skill you’ve learned as that inspiration.”

Her musical independence began when, at 17, she moved to Virginia Beach, Va., and threw herself into the music scene here. Watching local artists perform original songs, she felt a connection and soon realized she wanted to establish that same sort of rapport with those who might one day show up to hear her play.

“It was that feeling you have when you hear certain songs and get goosebumps and say, ‘Oh my gosh — I totally understand what they’re saying,’” she said. “That’s when I started thinking that I would love to play music that impacts people like that and makes them feel something.”

After a few years, a relationship took her to Dallas; the relationship, however, took her focus off of music, so she soon ended it. Looking for another home, she settled on Nashville, where her brother had found work as a session guitarist. The thought of moving to a town where a tossed rock is likely to land on a budding musician was intimidating, but she pushed forward and made the leap. It was a decision that would pay off.

“It’s been a great education,” Cleveland said. “When I got here, it was really the first time I’d had to get a day job in a while. There are so may amazing, amazing musicians here that you can go and play writers’ nights, and you can play some gigs, but for someone like me, I wasn’t about to make a living playing music. So I got a job leasing apartments, but after a while, I missed playing all the time and I struggled a lot with songwriting.”

And so she got back to basics, remembering what an old mentor taught her.

“I would come with all of this crazy stuff, emotions all over the map, and she would recognize the song and help me chip away at it and find what the real meaning was,” she said. “Or she would say, ‘You’ve got five different songs here — let’s pick one and build around that.’ There might be a line in my song, and I would write from that line. It was almost like self-discovery.”

In Nashville, she discovered both how simple and complex songwriting could be — and how it was all about the hook. Nashville songwriters, she learned, established the hook — vocal, melody, what-have-you — and used it as the basis for the rest of the song. It was something she’d been listening to since she first gravitated toward music as a child; it wasn’t until coming to Nashville that she realized how integral it was to the artistic process.

“It was completely new to me — I never really got that growing up, even though it was present in so much that I listened to,” she said. “There’s a certain way a lot of writers wrote, and I really began to see the what went into that. Some of the songs that sounded so natural and so simple and worked so well, I understood there was a lot of skill that went into writing that. I struggled with taking the style I was comfortable with and incorporating it into what I was learning.”

“Comin’ on Strong,” she believes, represents the fusion of those two styles. In a way, it’s more representative of who Kimber Cleveland is than anything else she’s ever done, and it stands to be a defining moment of her career. In the past, she’s been pushed to conform to the predetermined industry standards set forth by Nashville, and some of those close to her have encouraged her to try harder to knock down those industry doors. Cleveland, however, has resisted — because record deals and songwriting contacts have always represented the unknown, at a time when the only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to get out and play.

“I have not been very aggressive in Nashville, but I don’t want to look back and have any regrets about that, because I wasn’t sure my heart was in a publishing deal or a record deal,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted — but I did know that I wanted to go out and play a gig the next night. I found so much fulfillment in doing that. I’ve struggled with who I am as an artist — who I’m supposed to be and what people expect.

“I let myself be torn in several different directions, and it was all my own doing. The fact that I’ve loved all different styles of music has torn me. Am I that girl with a guitar? I’ve always played gigs that way. Or am I a pop artist — the pop-rock girl? This project I’m working on now is actually the first time that I’ve really felt like I’m putting something out there that represents me and represents what I’ve learned.”