Making one wonder if she’s truly cut out for the music industry, buckshot-country dynamo Nikki Lane confesses to major self-doubt near the end of an extended interview with the Straight.

“I was wondering near the beginning of this conversation if I’m a narcissist,” the endlessly entertaining singer says, on the line from Chicago. “Am I on the phone because I like talking to you or because I like spreading the word?”

Perhaps it’s a lot of both. This much is clear: Lane is great at interviews, giving answers that are as thoughtful as they are uncompromising and hilarious. By the time things wrap, she’ll have weighed in on everything from why staunch Christians absolutely need to have premarital sex (“You test the merchandise before you fully invest”) to what kind of up-and-coming rebel star (hello, Chris Stapleton!) would use his CMA Awards coming-out party as an excuse to perform with Justin Timberlake.

Refreshingly, Lane doesn’t duck the questions that pull back the curtain on her private life. Consider “Sleep With a Stranger” off her twangtastic, no-bullshit sophomore album, All or Nothin’. All space-cowboy guitars and tough-swagger vocals, the track has her hunkering down in a bar determined not to go home until she’s found someone to screw.

Nashville’s country-music establishment, she suggests, doesn’t quite know what to make of a female singer who sounds like she means it when rattling off lines like “You can tell me anything you want to/Just don’t call me after tonight.”

“I’m not trying to write a hit record—I’m trying to evoke a little emotion in people by talking about things that they really do,” Lane offers. “Take ‘Sleep With a Stranger’—what do you think about me being a girl and writing that song? That’s all I’ve been hearing lately: ‘Girls don’t write songs like that.’ Don’t girls sleep with strangers? If they don’t, then how does one stranger end up sleeping with another stranger?”

If folks can relate to “Sleep With a Stranger”, it’s perhaps because they’ve been in Lane’s shoes, even if they aren’t willing to admit it in the recording booth. The South Carolina–born, Nashville based singer wasn’t shy about mining her personal life for inspiration on All or Nothin’, to the point where you just know a song like “Good Man” is about a partner who was anything but.

“I was married, and I was bent out of shape about it and digging up old songs where I was crying for him to pay attention to my needs—that’s what ‘Good Man’ is about,” Lane says. “Then I got divorced. And what happens after you get divorced? You go out dressed up to get drunk and hook up with somebody, which is what ‘Sleep With a Stranger’ is about. Every person I know does that, and if you don’t, then ‘Wow!’ ”

Helping focus her musically on All or Nothin’ was Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach. At the risk of alienating a country audience that expects every modern singer to sound like Shania Twain crossed with early Taylor Swift, the two went into the session open to all ideas. That anything-goes spirit makes All or Nothin’ a country album in the most rebellious sense of the term, the songs ricocheting from the 80-proof Americana of “Love’s on Fire” to the creeping swamp blues of the title track. Whether intentionally or by osmosis, Auerbach’s gritty but tasteful production draws on everything from Scottish twee pop (“You Can’t Talk to Me Like That”) to southern-fried ’60s garage rock (“I Don’t Care”).

“There’s this Instagram account called We Hate Pop Country,” Lane says. “The other day the guy who runs it said, ‘Country music isn’t dead—it’s been hidden from you.’ And then he had 40 really badass country singers laid out on a map: Sturgill Simpson, Tommy Ash, and Whitey Morgan—real country singers. I wanna be on that side of the fence.”

In some ways, she’s already there, with All or Nothin’ having been hailed as pure gold by a long list of publications that starts with the Guardian and Rolling Stone. That the singer has also toured with acts as varied as Social Distortion, Spiritualized, and Loretta Lynn also speaks volumes about what she’s doing, mostly because if those veterans have anything in common, it’s that their bullshit meters are set pretty high.

“The last thing I want people to say about me is ‘That girl can really sing,’ ” Lane says. “In country, and even in pop music, I’m like, ‘I get it. You can sing—you just ran that note up and down and backwards around the wall, but did you listen to your fucking lyrics?’ A lot of it is so strategic and dumbed-down so that it can be marketed to everyone.”

The same can’t be said of Nikki Lane.

Nikki Lane plays the Cobalt on Saturday (November 21).