The time is early afternoon. The meal is breakfast. The year is 1996. The soundtrack is 1979: Blondie's "Dreaming" ("When I met you in the restaurant..."). The setting is Irish: the back garden of a pub. The beverage is French: cafe au lait. The country is America, specifically the East Village of New York City. And the voice of the woman across the table is also Irish, dark and droll with a husky laugh. Dublin born, she identifies herself as a New Yorker, and she's as likely to sing "Dreaming" as "Danny Boy."

Eventually, the recorded voice of Debbie Harry falls silent and a different kind of music begins. It is lively, Celtic influenced, blooming with strings and oddly catchy. Susan McKeown pauses over her Weetabix and smiles; her face flashes from earnest to delighted as she beckons toward the pub's interior. "Hey, that's me!" she says. Then she pokes at her cereal as she enthusiastically describes the cookies she baked for her cellist's wedding.

Myriad elements have made Susan McKeown into who she is now: a perceptive, captivating singer and songwriter with a strong band, enough gigs to allow her to quit her nonmusical jobs, a deal with the small maverick label 1-800-PRIME-CD, and an astonishing album, Bones. "I'm searching for evidence," she sings in the title song, "some part of life I can claim." And while the album is not an autobiography, it draws on the gifts and griefs of her young life and their connection to deeper, older relics.

McKeown grew up outside Dublin, where at the center of her family was a strong woman — her mother, a church musician. "I grew up watching her go out to gigs. Dad would come home from work, everyone would have dinner, and then she'd say, 'Right, I'm off.' " McKeown would often go with her mother to church events. "Weddings and funerals." She smiled. "All the heavy stuff." From Jeannie McKeown Ryan, she must have learned that behind the mysteries of life was often work — and that behind the worker, if she were an artist, were more mysteries.

The first disruption to her calm childhood was a move to the country when McKeown was 13. There she met a friend who introduced her to traditional Irish music. "Growing up in Ireland, you're not necessarily exposed to traditional music automatically," she explained. Aside from that one friend, none of her compatriots listened to traditional music — even now. She said, "I have a friend who was telling her friend in Ireland about Altan and he's like, 'Who's Altan?'" Then, two years after she discovered traditional music, the "heavy stuff" came down on McKeown. Her mother died.

I didn't ask McKeown how this event made her feel; I didn't need to ask. The mother-spirit is alive in her music and in her. When she plants her feet on the ground of the stage and sets free that lofty voice, she seems to draw from some reserve of matriarchal power. Said singer Lisa Moscatiello, "One thing I really like about her is that she sounds like a grown woman and not a little girl." A self-described feminist, McKeown changed her surname from her father's Ryan to her mother's McKeown as one way of holding on to her mother. McKeown's mother had known "the woman who teaches most of the opera singers in Ireland." She invited the 15-year-old to an audition, and McKeown was accepted into the College of Music. An actress as well as a singer, McKeown respected opera, but soon began to chafe against its formality. "I was going in there for breathing classes at eight in the morning, and I'm not a morning person," she said. Something was missing. "I was much more into folk music... music about the people in the way that people talked, in English and Irish." She left the college after a year and fell in with the kids around the corner on Grafton Street. "I joined this group of guys who were doing jazz stuff, and I started singing jazz standards. I took up smoking, and I started drinking... hanging around shop fronts at night, singing. And I was able to develop a loud voice that way, trying to reach from one end of the street to the other."

Then she was offered a scholarship to study performing arts, acting and singing, in the United States. She arrived here in 1990 and was fortunate to find another teacher. "We had to do classical songs, and I'd say 'Listen, I don't want that opera voice, OK?' She said, 'I know, I know... I'll help you develop your natural one.' I learned that your voice is in your body and whatever is going on with you is connected to what's coming out and the sound that you're developing." She gave up the petty vices of her Grafton Street days; if her body isn't a temple, at least it's a pretty sound vessel these days.

But there's still something else, some kind of alchemy, some kind of magic. You can be born into a musical family, trained by the best teachers in schools and streets, shaped by tragedy and success and work, and there's still no guarantee that you will create an album that keeps people up all night. McKeown found her magic, and the result was Bones.

It's hard talking about the songs on the album. McKeown doesn't want to define the songs. "I like people to get the wrong thing from it, and if they get the wrong thing from it that's grand." Members of The Chanting House are Michelle Kinney (cello and accordion), Lindsey Horner (double bass, bass clarinet, tin whistle), Chris Cunningham (electric and acoustic guitars), and Joe Trump (drums). In addition to singing, McKeown plays guitar and bodhrán. Guest artists on Bones include Johnny Cunningham and producer Jimi Zhivago. The songs are mostly written by McKeown. "Westron Wynde/Westlin Winds" incorporates a verse by Robert Burns; "Gorm" is a traditional Irish lament; and "Snakes" ends with a song in Gaelic, "Mná na hÉireann."

When Lisa Moscatiello heard the song "Albatross" from Bones on a sampler she picked up at the 1996 Folk Alliance conference, "It just bowled me over. I played it over and over... probably 50 times." She started giving her friends copies of the album, which was then only available at Chanting House gigs and by mail order.

In a review of the album on the Internet folk music mailing list, Moscatiello warned that Bones "is not an easy album. Because I did not have an already-existing category in my mind for this music, it rubbed against me at first, taking several listenings before I could absorb it." Indeed, the 13 tracks on the album are different from one another, and no individual track fits neatly into a genre. The songs swirl around, stubbornly refusing to settle, and while not everyone will appreciate their idiosyncratic grace, listeners who take hold of them will be carried to some exotic places.

In a world where, to succeed, you need to fit into an already existing mold, can a shape shifter like McKeown survive? David Seitz, president of 1-800-PRIME-CD, thinks so. The label specializes in the sort of music that bedevils most marketers. "Our artists are mostly singer-songwriters, but most of the time there's something about them that makes them different," said Seitz.

Seitz recalled hearing Loreena McKennitt in Canada eight years ago, "with only seven people in the audience. It may take a while, but what happened to Loreena McKennitt could happen to Susan. What her music will do is twist their ears a little bit." "I'm not the stadium type of girl," said McKeown. She believes her career "will never get at that kind of level, and I'm quite happy with that!" She performs frequently in the New York area, mostly with the Chanting House, and she'd like to tour farther afield.

McKeown likes her album and believes the work and money that she, her husband and manager Brendan Jamieson, the band, and everyone else put into it have paid off. "There's a magic, there's a little sparkle in it, I think." McKeown doesn't practice much, but she sings all the time. As we leave St. Dymphnas Pub (named for "the patron saint of mental illness"), where Bones is still playing on the house stereo, she sang harmony with herself at the cash register. "I'm always singing, walking around," she said. "It doesn't matter here — no one cares.

"I think everybody comes [to New York] for a year," she said wryly, "and then they're going home. Then, six years later..." Six years later, and she's a true New Yorker. "Once I accepted it I decided I was going to stay here and get a lot done. I knew if I came here endless possibilities would open." Call it practical magic, this self-possessed path that McKeown follows. She has talent, she has training, she has support from family and friends. She makes her own luck. But then something else takes over: fate? The mystery that fuels creation can't be defined, can't be mounted like a butterfly.