Angelica Garcia brings her strong Medicine to the Bottleneck tonight

Angelica Garcia’s debut album, Medicine for Birds, is the sort of record you find yourself steadily cranking up with each new song. Opener “Little Bird” slowly stomps to life, but by the time you’ve reached the swaggering rocker “Orange Flowers,” halfway through, you’ve already pushed the volume up to 11.

You can file Medicine under country as easily as you can say it’s a blues-inflected collection of catchy pop, but each track swirls its elements so thoroughly that no one song adheres to a single genre. Whatever you call it, though, it’s a charmer, through and through — as is the singer-songwriter herself. She wraps up a tour with fellow genre-busting, straight-talking musician Lydia Loveless tonight at the Bottleneck.

Ahead of that, I spoke with Garcia by phone. She was, she told me, “somewhere in Mississippi,” and she was eating baked beans.

The Pitch: Do you enjoy getting to try different things while you’re on the road?

Angelica Garcia: I enjoy getting to eat different things, but I really just enjoy stopping different places and meeting different people. There’s something just so satisfying about rolling up to a place that you’ve never been before and just kind of hanging out and stuff, even if you only get to be there for a few minutes, you know?

That sounds like you’re trying to make the most of your time touring.

I’m just one of those painfully optimistic people, so maybe that’s my fault. But I guess, like — do you ever feel like you get caught up in your own little world, like at home, where everybody has those same three places they go all the time? So, it’s kind of nice to go out of that space, and remember that people are doing stuff in Brownsville, Tennessee. It’s great. I love traveling. It’s been a lot of fun.

Is this tour your first acquaintance with Lydia Loveless?

Yeah, as of the other day. I just actually met her for the first time yesterday, and this is [my] first big tour ever as a whole band. Like, we’ve never been out longer than maybe a few days at a time.

Despite the fact that you and Lydia have different sounds, it seems like the way each of your music feels makes this a really natural fit.

Yeah, I thought that was funny, too. When I was first told about the tour, I wasn’t familiar with her music — but that’s kind of my own fault, because it takes me a while to hear new music, because I’m one of those people where I get something new and latch onto it for, like, a whole month. When I did hear her music, though, it was so great. It was great to hear another songwriter that really cares about lyrics and has a good sense of melody. It was a pleasure to play with her last night.

It seems like the fact that the two of you have a sense of humor about things is also complementary. Like, “Orange Flower” is really kind of playful about a weird relationship issue.

Why, thank you. I have a really sassy dad and I think that my entire teenage years, I heard that I was a “sasshole,” so I’m just taking that and running with it. I don’t know — I don’t like to be mean, but I like to poke fun at things and have a little laugh about how silly they are.

It’s come up quite a bit in other interviews you’ve done that the songs on the album changed a lot in the studio. How did, for instance, “Orange Flower” change from its original form?

I basically have a bunch of these super, “I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m going to open up GarageBand and just go for it” kind of recordings that I did for this whole album, that I did before I even met [producer] Charlie [Peacock]. With “Orange Flower,” for example, that line — I’ve been walking ’round in circles — I actually was in my room, with my guitar on me, walking around in circles, trying to come up with the next thing to say.

It’s different in the sense that Charlie has all this fancy equipment, and I was just working with this crappy laptop, singing into the Skype microphone. The other thing was, like, if I wanted a chorus or something, and I wanted it to sound bigger, sometimes I would have to do three tracks, where I would go all the way down the hallway and sing. Because I didn’t have any kind of effect thing, I would just have to go into my mom’s hallway and make it work. Granted, it happened while they were all at work, because I don’t think I would’ve been able to make it happen at any other time. [laughs]

But I guess the biggest difference between the album and the demos is that the demos are “take what you got and make something with it.” Like, I didn’t have any drums, so I was clapping a lot, or I would take a pen and hit a glass of water or my bedpost or something to mimic a rimshot or whatever, because that’s all I had. I like the album a lot, but there’s a special place in my heart for those demos, because it’s like, “You know what? I took something and did something with it.”

Lydia Loveless with Angelica Garcia

Monday, February 13, at the Bottleneck