Mieka Pauley’s auto mechanic has to be the happiest mechanic in the land.

With a tour schedule that stretches from her Cambridge, Mass. home to stops in Chicago, Seattle, Hollywood, St. Louis, Atlanta, D.C., Philly, New York and many others – all in a single month’s time, mind you – the 24-year-old, cute-as-a-button singer-songwriter buzzes her poor little Toyota-that-could across miles of endless interstate from coast to coast. All at her own expense and her mechanic’s delight.

“My passion is not driving for eight hours a day,” she giggles. “My passion is the music.” There’s a lot to this whole music racket that young, aspiring singer-songwriters never consider, she says.

But why would she? After all, she’s just a girl with a guitar who drives around the country playing music for fun, right? Presumably, one would think so. Especially with how disaffected she seems by it all. But Pauley could be the most talented, rapidly progressing, young female singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of. In her brief but heady 24 years, she’s already packed in a career’s worth of milestones, including sharing stages with the likes of Eric Clapton, Wyclef Jean, Blues Traveler and many others and stuffing her Toyota’s trunk full with countless songwriting awards.

And bafflingly, she’s done it alone, on her own terms, sans a backing band – a fact that flouts the orchestral temperament of her songwriting. In effect, Pauley’s songs are a lesson in brevity. In method, she shows some serious chops, a nouveau Joni Mitchell wrapped in a mélange of rock, classic soul and contemporary R&B.

On her most recent release, a self-titled, seven-song EP recorded live in the studio, the renegade starlet sparkles: viscerally poetic and deceivingly uncomplicated. A single acoustic track plunks out cavernous arrays of murky, off-kilter R&B chords, providing the moody backdrop for her true allure – a voice that both tempts and slays with the relentlessness of a pouty lover. And her songs roll off so effortlessly that they mask the stifling creative struggle that Pauley battles daily.

“The act of songwriting I hate,” she hisses. “The act is really painful. I’d rather just wake up and have a song; some people describe it as that easy, and it’s not easy for me at all.” She had me fooled.

Not more than a couple years ago, a capricious Pauley trotted away from Harvard toting a degree in Biological Anthropology. So, naturally, she took a nine-to-five as a secretary. “I didn’t want to have to bring my work home with me,” she chuckles. “Then I’d always have an excuse not to start playing.”

Eventually, the job weighed on her muse, so she quit and literally took her act to the streets. Squatting down in the middle of Harvard Square, Pauley just started playing and singing for passersby. And surprisingly, she was so compelling that the number of CDs she sold pulled in enough money to cover rent for the next few months. “That really helped me make the transition,” she recalls. “That’s when I made the decision that I was actually gonna do it.”

Like an ageless Aesop’s fable preaching, “Follow your heart, not your college degree,” Pauley’s dicey move paid off, and within a year, she was touring nationally. It seems, however, she had no other choice. “I couldn’t admit that I was a musician,” she says, “because I didn’t feel like I was actually doing it.”

Still, even while Pauley zips zealously about the country, guitar riding shotgun, her goals remain somehow grounded. “My biggest goal has been attained,” she smiles. “And that’s just to be a musician and be able to say that and not make excuses, like, ‘Oh, I will be a musician, once I quit this secretary job.’” Now, if she could only find time to study a Toyota repair manual.

For up-to-date information, or to purchase a recording, set your web browser to www.mieka.com.