As warm and sunny as she is in person, there’s something unmistakably dark and twisted about Kelly Haigh. You don’t have to be a practising psychologist to pick up on this; all you need to do is take a quick look around her Granville Street hair salon. Located in the Vancouver Block building, the 11th floor chop shop is part cool kitsch, part deliciously creepy natural-history museum.

The Georgia Straight is at the studio to talk about the Winnipeg-raised Vancouverite’s DIY debut album Country Western Star (subtitled Starring Kelly Haigh With Frances the singing dog). The record is pure gold, serving up the kind of unvarnished Americana that predates big hats, bigger belt buckles, and nut-hugging jeans. It’s also one of the great left-field releases in the long and colourful history of the Vancouver indie scene; Haigh spent her first 38-or-so years on the planet having never written a song, and then suddenly roared out of nowhere with a genuine classic.

“I didn’t even know what I was doing,” she admits of Country Western Star, which she recorded by herself using GarageBand on an Apple computer. “I’m surprised that anyone can even listen to the album.”

Before we get too deeply into the birth of Kelly Haigh the alt-country-ish star, let’s deal with her needs-to-be-seen-to-be-believed salon. In no particular order, the on-site pop-cultureartifacts include a nun doll in a homemade ripped-paper habit, a baby lamb with jackalope horns riding a sea turtle, and a curio cabinet filled with such oddities as Lily Fawn’s Snake Oil. Severed vintage-looking doll’s heads accessorize the salon’s mirrors.

The excellence doesn’t stop there. Haigh has a thing for Victorian taxidermy, which explains why the walls and shelves are lined with foxes in top hats, antelopes in papal headdresses, and squirrels sporting tiny elaborate crowns. In a corner of the shop sits a ’50s-model robin’s-egg-blue baby buggy, the baby in question being a stuffed badger.

And then there are Haigh’s Tim Burton–meets–Margaret Keane paintings, which hang all over the shop. Look one way and pale-skinned, wide-eyed twins hold the head and body of a ripped-in-two rabbit, while Beetlejuice–like smokestacks belch smoky poison in the background. Look the other way and a young blond girl sits atop a dead deer by the side of a road, as bright red balloons float above her head.

It’s all as messed-up as it is undeniably fascinating. But don’t judge Haigh for walking on the dark side: there’s a good reason she turned out the way she did. It all goes back to her childhood in Winnipeg.

“My dad was a truck driver,” the easygoing and friendly brunette relates, laughing, which is something she does often. “He would come off the road—in the ’70s, when people didn’t wear seat belts—and tell me stories. One time, I was probably seven or eight, he came home and said he’d come across a car crash at three in the morning. It was pitch dark so he set some flares, and he tripped over a body. He went back to see if the guy was okay, but the guy had no head.

“For years afterwards,” she continues, “I would watch out the car window on road trips—this thing happened in Ontario—asking, ”˜Did they ever find that guy’s head?’ I thought that maybe I would find it in the weeds somewhere. Like, ”˜Pull over! I see it!’ To this day, I’m so crazy about severed heads.”

And then, as if to one-up herself, she launches into a tale about the last time she saw her maternal grandmother. Haigh was 10, and visiting her on her farm.

“My kitten, which I’d picked out, was laying outside the barn with its head exposed—a cow had stepped on it,” Haigh remembers. “She [the grandmother] said, ”˜You don’t just leave it there—get a hammer, right now!’ And she sent me for a hammer. I was bawling, but she said, ”˜You don’t let a thing suffer like that,’ and walked away. That instilled this funny thing about suffering, and witnessing suffering, in me. The idea of being responsible for it if you see it. It colours everything, so I think that I incorporate suffering, or dead things, with happy things into what I do as a way of making things feel better.”

Given that world view, one might expect Country Western Star to be blacker than a murder-ballads compilation put together by Nick Cave and the Handsome Family. Instead, the retro-brilliant album finds the late-blooming singer gunning for the affection of those who remember when Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton were the reigning queens of Nashville. Looking back, her childhood in the ’Peg found her torn between her mother’s affection for the Rolling Stones and Diana Ross and her father’s love of vintage country gold. It was her father’s records that would win out, but not in a clear-cut way.

“I kind of loved and hated country all at once,” Haigh says. “I’m trying to think how old I was when my dad moved out. If he’d stuck around, I’d have had a lot more country growing up. Thinking back, though, Dolly Parton and Conway Twitty were big. And Gene Watson. I loved Gene Watson—I wanted to marry him so badly. But he didn’t get that note and he moved on.”

So did Haigh, eventually landing in Vancouver with her mother and two brothers, who’d followed her father across the country after he’d cut bait and moved out. Haigh, whose talent for drawing was already evident when she was two, began doing her best to pick up another set of skills after reconnecting with her dad.

“When I first moved out here I lived in a grungy apartment with my dad in New West,” she remembers. “I didn’t have any friends at all—I had my dog, Muffin. But my dad bought me an electric guitar, and I used to buy guitar magazines for tablature—I’d learn Joe Satriani stuff. I thought I was pretty good, putting on bedroom performances for Muffin.”

Sometime after that, Haigh played keyboards in Vancouver indie-unit Ashley Park, a group that never appeared in town much but somehow managed to land gigs at South by Southwest and the legendary 100 Club in London, England. When the band’s leader, Terry Miles, got more interested in making films than music, Haigh ended up devoting her time to painting and cutting hair, her inner singer-songwriter finally surfacing during a road trip to Tofino.

The way the singer tells it, she was riding shotgun with Miles (who also happens to be her partner) as the two were heading across Vancouver Island to a cabin. In the middle of the journey a deer appeared at the side of the road. The sighting would inspire Country Western Star’s wonderful “Eight Point Suicide”, an echo-drenched ballad that would fit perfectly on a mix tape between Carolyn Mark and Julee Cruise.

“These words to a song started coming into my head—the whole tune of it and everything,” Haigh says. “When we got there [the cabin], I thought, ”˜Oh, my God, I think that I just wrote my first song.’ I wrote down the words, took a bath, and then started singing it over and over again to myself until I knew it, because I didn’t have a guitar.”

From there, the songs on Country Western Star practically poured out. Haigh, despite being what she laughingly describes as a “highly functioning retard”, recorded them herself on her Apple.

“When we got home from Tofino, within three or four months, I had all the songs done,” she says—no mean feat considering Country Western Star contains 25 tracks. “It sure didn’t take them very long to get written. It was literally something I did every night.”

The finished product suggests that, while she might be a late-bloomer, she’s also a natural. Throwback country doesn’t get much more stellar than “Ballad of the Heaven Sent”, a tale of love and blood-soaked murder where, over acoustic guitar and played-by-angels strings, Haigh sings, “I’m asking for forgiveness, just like the Bible says/Or is it too late to repent, now that the sucker’s dead?”

For a reminder of what Nashville sounded like pre-Garth and Shania, head to the loping, piano-adorned “They’re ALL Ugly”, which makes a great case that men were put on this earth solely to break the hearts of those they shack up with. “Country Western Star” finds the sweet spot between CinemaScope-swept dream pop and down-home Americana; “Forever Frances” comes on like Sunday-morning services at the Grand Ole Opry; and “Sparrow Lavinia” conjures up sun-splashed spring days in the coal-mining hills of Kentucky.

As fully formed as the songs are on Country Western Star, the record is also a testament to the idea that art is meant to be spontaneous. Take, for example, “If You Love Me”, which, even though it clocks in at a punk-rock-length 34 seconds, comes off like a gem ripped from the Tammy Wynette songbook. Rather than monkey with the song by stretching it out, Haigh decided that some gifts are meant to be accepted as they are given.

“I woke in the middle of a dream where I was on-stage in a big blue gown with all these lights on me, like Loretta,” she says of “If You Love Me”. “I was like, ”˜Oh, my God—I have to turn this into a song.’ But no more would come except that little short bit.”

Country Western Star makes an iron-clad case that songwriting comes easy to Haigh. The big challenge now is actually singing her songs to an audience that doesn’t consist of stuffed animals. She admits that performing live remains a prospect that she’s not sure about. Once again, this has something to do with her childhood, which, the more she reveals about it, makes you think that it would make a full-blown country-and-western opera. In other words, cue the sophomore album.

“Something inside makes me not want to,” she says with a laugh about playing live. “Maybe it’s because the first job I ever had was at McDonald’s. Back then, when there were no McChickens behind you, you had to yell to the back ”˜Down a Chicken!’ The first day at work I had to yell ”˜Down a Chicken’, except that my voice cracked in the middle of that and I started bawling because I was so shy to be speaking in front of people. So you can imagine me being on the stage.”