From feminist folk to loopy hip-hop, from Indy to L.A.

In 1998, then-NUVO music editor Steve Hammer profiled three up-and-comers in the music scene: 16-year-old singer-songwriter Emily Wells (who was pictured on the cover of that January issue), experimental electronic trio Science Faire and Zen Jal Qwa. Two of those names have long been forgotten, even locally; Wells' name has only grown in stature, and she's made her fame on her own terms.

To trace her journey from guitar-toting folk precocity to rapping violinist, it might help to start with that 1998 profile. Here are the first two lines: "From the moment you first hear the voice of 16-year-old folksinger Emily Wells, you know that you're listening to an original. From her pink guitar to her quiet, intense songs about relationships and modern life, Wells' music recalls the initial recordings of Ani DiFranco or the Indigo Girls, or of My So-Called Life set to music."

"I appreciate the person that I was at that time and try not to be too embarrassed," Wells says in 2009, groaning a little after hearing me read those lines, dated by their My So-Called Life reference. I've reached Wells by phone while she walks through her native Los Angeles, about a week before she'll return to Indianapolis for Thursday night's show at The Vollrath.

But let's stay in late '90s for a little longer. While she may have been on the girl-with-guitar trip at the time, she was experimenting with different subcultures. In press notes that accompany her new EP Dirty, she tells of late nights at the Chatterbox: "As a dirty teen I would sneak into a tiny jazz hole in the wall almost every night and watch the band play. My favorite person there was an old upright bass player with a bushy smile. The women who worked there knew I wasn't of age … They served me coffee while I fell in love with live performance."

And when Hammer asked her about the future, she said that she planned to go to college, but to study something unpredictable, not music at least. But she betrayed an alternate game plan when she told him that "I want to be comfortable enough so I can go on the road with my music, even if I'm driving myself in a van all over the country."

Indeed, the road, not college, became Wells' destination. "I never signed, but I worked briefly with a label [Epic]," Wells tells me in 2009. "Then I also had a period of total vagabond-style living, trucking around and playing where I could. I eventually settled in Los Angeles, and I kind of started over in a way because I had such a strong influence from the label, trying to get me to write catchy songs and having a vision for this young girl. I was pretty obsessed with recording; it wasn't like I was any good at it but I was definitely interested in it. So I taught myself the basics and then grew from there and started collecting instruments.

"Then three years ago I found Joey [Reina], who plays bass, and Sam [Halterman], who plays drums - now they're like my brothers," Wells continues. "That changed things for me because it wasn't just me all the time; they brought their influence and their artistry to the table. We did a record called Beautiful Sleepyhead, which is more influenced by the young girl you were just talking about, more guitars but still kind of lush, and I was doing more strings on those songs. I thought, I really want to be able to play my violin, and that's when the whole looping thing started."

The whole looping thing is at the heart of Wells' last two releases - 2008's The Symphonies: Dreams Memories & Parties and 2009's Dirty EP - as well as a live show that will feature, in Indianapolis, just Wells, Halterman and a battery of strings, synths and pedals.

"I didn't intend on calling it Symphonies. The first one I wrote was so lush and full of strings, it felt like creating a symphony on stage. So I called it 'Symphony Number One' because I was being clever or something, numbering them. Then the next one came, and it was a project - this will be the next record. So we got up to 10. It's terribly insulting, me calling it a symphony, for people who write real symphonies."

Wells' cover of the Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy" on Dirty made me question her attitude towards couplets like "I never thought it could happen, this rappin' stuff / I was too used to packin' gats and stuff" that depart quite a bit from her own life experience. It's a problematic track: While her interpretation is of a piece with the rest of her work - woozy looped violins, heavy but crisp hip-hop beats, a froggy, vibrato-laden voice - it's hard not to think of every other indie-rock cover of a well-known rap song that's played for laughs or irony.

But Wells insists, "I wasn't being ironic in any way. I thought of it more as a tribute because I'm a fan, first and foremost; I've been influenced a lot by Biggie. My intentions were pure, and I find the song really moving and fun to play."

Wells continues to push her music beyond the implicit constraints on a typical "folk" singer-songwriter, which has brought her to different forums and stages, from the Calgary Folk Festival to a bill with an art-rap duo, and to the 2008 Hotel Café tour, a singer-songwriter based tour on which she says she "stuck out like a sore thumb, but in a good way."

She's in the writing stage on another project on which she hopes to incorporate the talents of more collaborators, perhaps renting a live room to record strings in real time (instead of recording piecemeal, as she has on previous efforts). "I went to Berkeley for three weeks and stayed in this beautiful house that a friend was at. It was one of those bizarre situations. I just wrote a bunch."

While Wells had an opportunity to grab fame early in life, she instead took the time to develop her voice. "It's been a really slow, slow build," she says. "Not just in getting fans, but for me personally, as an artist, taking the time to try my best to hone my craft, and I'm still making that effort every day."

Wells has earned some recent press coverage for Symphonies and Dirty: a feature on NPR's All Things Considered that focused on what seemed like novelties to the public radio crowd (the melding of hip-hop and classical; the use of looping and samples); and a recent piece on Chicago Public Radio's Sound Opinions (hosted by the music editors of the Tribune and Sun-Times) featured Dirty as one of the year's overlooked records.

More than a decade after leaving Indianapolis, Wells says that something of the Midwest, of Indianapolis, remains in her work: "The rainstorms, the middle of the winter, the smell of summer, the leaves in the fall: All those things still live inside of me."