A seasoned pro, yet singer is only 19

Not many singer/songwriters have, by the age of 19, recorded two acclaimed albums, toured as a featured vocalist with jazz great Herbie Hancock, and performed everywhere from the Bonnaroo Music Festival to Carnegie Hall.

By any measure, Sonya Kitchell is a special case.

Asked if, given all that experience, she feels like a teenager, Kitchell laughs boisterously. "No," she says. "I mean, sometimes."

It's an arctic evening in Philadelphia, and Kitchell is about to begin her series of February gigs at the Tin Angel. (Her "Burn Brightly Residency" resumes tonight and concludes next Thursday.)

The singer is wrapped in a wool caftan and sporting fingerless gloves. When she takes the stage a few hours later in that garb, she tells the audience, "I look like I'm wearing a rug. Very trendy."

Of course, Kitchell has never cared much about fashion. It's music that has always consumed her.

You don't build a resumé like hers without starting early.

"It's all I've ever wanted to do," she says. "From the time I was 7, I wanted to be a singer. I just knew."

By 9, she was writing songs. She had her first band at 12 and released her first album, Words Came Back to Me, in 2006, when she was 16.

That was a fairly conventional acoustic pop affair. Her follow-up in September, This Storm, is a more ambitious affair, a collection of mood poems that evinces influences from Duffy to Tori Amos to Laura Nyro.

Malcolm Burn, the Grammy-winning producer who has worked with everyone from Emmylou Harris to Iggy Pop, guided Kitchell through This Storm. He was struck by her fully formed personality.

"My initial impression of Sonya was of someone who was quite self-absorbed and of course very self-confident," he says via e-mail. "Both by-products I expect of modern parenting techniques."

Actually Kitchell's upbringing was rather bohemian. Maybe that's why she's comfortable today as a touring vagabond, living on the road.

"I sound like a hippie sometimes," she says, "but I am a bit of a hippie because that is the way I was raised."

She grew up in bucolic Ashfield, Mass., the older child of two artists, in an avant-garde environment.

"Going to my first year of school [at 5], all I learned about was praying mantises," she says, laughing. "So random. But that's what the teacher was interested in.

"My parents always treated me, not like an adult, but like an equal," she says, explaining her precocity. "I grew up in a household where my younger brother and I were friends with [my parents'] friends.

"We'd go to dinner parties with them and be treated like human beings, not like children. And when adults talked down to me, I would get really angry, like 'This is an outrage!' "

The result is a young woman with very old-school sensibilities, someone with a soft spot for vinyl, a teenager who is passionate about jazz and classical.

But always, always immersed in music.

"One thing that frustrates me is that I love music so much, I can never make up my mind whether I'm going to listen to it or play it," she says.

She's still growing into the songs she wrote some time ago.

"I'd have feelings and then try to interpret them," she says of her approach to lyrics. "Or I'd hear people talking about something and try to capture what it would feel like - feelings I'd never experienced.

"Then as I got a little older, I started to experience them and be able to actually personalize them."

One of her most treasured memories is opening for Richie Havens when she was 14. And through Hancock, she met her idol, Joni Mitchell.

"She was definitely it for me," the singer says.

The list of artists she would love to play with someday includes Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon.

But there's no hurry. The 19-year-old Kitchell has nothing but time.