Lauren Anderson’s debut is a triumph

An hour after returning to Kansas City from Topeka on a Sunday night — following a performance at the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge regional qualifier — Lauren Anderson is sipping wine on the patio of a Crossroads restaurant. She hasn’t taken off her performance makeup, and the moonlight finds its way to the glitter around her eyelids.

“There was a lot of talent there today, and we didn’t get the nomination,” Anderson tells me with a slight shrug. “Which, you know, as bluesy as we are, we’re not that traditional — and I think that’s what they were looking for. And that’s OK.”

Anderson’s music is closer to the blues-soul fusion of, say, Joss Stone or Norah Jones than it is to the loud, furious riffs of her contemporaries — including Katy Guillen and the Girls, 2014 International Blues Challenge finalists. But Anderson doesn’t see the Topeka venture as a wasted trip.

“I felt really good about what we played, and that alone was a good enough reason to compete,” she says. “I think the IBC puts you in front of a lot of people that you wouldn’t normally be in front of. Even though we’re not traditional blues and I’m not interested in really changing what we’re doing, it’s still a good opportunity for us.”

Besides, she adds, the preparation for the competition was the ideal primer for her Thursday night show at Knuckleheads, marking the release of Truly Me. It’s the 30-year-old singer’s debut album, arriving nearly a year after the EP Do & Hope.

The 14 tracks on Truly Me are cherry-picked, Anderson says, from the stack of songs she wrote throughout her 20s, starting around the time she relocated to Kansas City from her native Chicago. These are the songs that appear most regularly in her live sets. Now, on record, with their easy, catchy hooks and retro rhythms, they make an ideal backdrop for Anderson’s impressive voice.

Most of Anderson’s lyrics takel their inspiration from the predictable themes of love and its myriad shades, but Truly Me is far from pedestrian. When Anderson’s husky, honeyed voice drops the steamy opening lines of “Shame” — I know you think I’m sexy, you know I want it, too — the confidence on display is that of a veteran, not a beginner. Truly Me — made with bassist Dylan Reiter, guitarist Adam Stuber and drummer Jeff Daniels — pulses with purpose, and shows the singer very much in command.

“I’d really always known that I wanted to sing,” Anderson says of her relatively late start. “There was a time where I thought about classic opera singing, and I went to school for vocal performance. But halfway through that degree, I began to realize that I don’t really love opera.” She punctuates this admission with a wry laugh. “With the intention of still being able to have a day job, I got my masters in musical therapy. I didn’t finish that until September 2012, and really, at that point, I finally felt like I had the time to put more of an effort in performing.”

Anderson still works as a musical therapist in the pediatric unit at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She enjoys it, she says, but it’s not her reason for waking up in the morning.

“As much as I do love being a musical therapist, the drive to be a performer has never gone away,” Anderson says. “Sometimes I regret not going for this earlier, but then I think one of the benefits of starting this in my late 20s is life experience. I’m motivated now because I’m older, I’m 30, and I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Even though 30 is not that old, it’s easy for you to feel like you should have started a lot earlier.”

The next step, Anderson says, is a tour to promote Truly Me — including a stop in Chicago, where she’ll hold a CD release show “mostly for my parents’ friends,” she admits with a laugh.

Anderson sees Truly Me as the result of an upbringing heavy on Chicago blues and, later, what she heard in Kansas City. “There is such a vibrant, rich musical scene here,” she says at one point. And now that scene includes her among the area’s leading blues talents — joining Danielle Nicole Schnebelen (formerly of Trampled Under Foot), Samantha Fish and Katy Guillen and the Girls. Is this market, in fact, almost too rich?

“The main thing that I think all of us should remember is that there’s no reason we can’t all succeed,” Anderson says. “I think a lot of times — especially females — we get competitive, but there’s no reason that we can’t all exist and prosper as individuals here. That being said, my music is not quite as traditional blues — but neither are Danielle and Samantha and Katy. I think we all have our own take on the blues, and I think there’s room for all of us.”