When Samara Jade is in the spotlight, her usually introverted spirit takes center stage and invites the public into her imagination through song.

“It is super vulnerable,” the 30-year-old singer-songwriter said while sitting in a small Port Townsend garden in golden afternoon sunlight. “I have never really been a performer by default. It is not something I have ever wanted to do. It is not something I ever thought I would be doing.

“I do not naturally like to be in the spotlight. I’m not that kind of person. I am naturally more introverted and don’t like the attention on me, so there is a great irony in that.”

Jade said she has found such personality types are typical for many singer-songwriters she has met during her cross-country travels.

“Songwriting is an extremely introspective thing because it definitely involves the deep spelunking into the human psyche and inner realms of emotion,” she said. “And so I think it does take a certain personality, and oftentimes those personalities aren’t the kind of people who want to be in the spotlight, so it is something I have grow into out of necessity.”

Jade attended college in the Southeast and studied environmental science.

“I am always like, ‘Ugh, why did I get that degree?’” she said. “I am not using it. It is such a waste of everything. But, I think it has definitely shaped who I have become as a person and also my values and what I think and write about. That is definitely a focus of my music — landscape and place and nature and birds and plants.”

Those things bring her peace when she is alone, and she expresses that through her music.

“I definitely spend a lot of time alone in the forest, and that is often when songs come to me, when I am in that space,” she said. “That other people enjoy listening to it, and are moved by it, is just a bonus for me. I enjoy taking people on a journey through emotions.”

When Jade is performing on stage, is it almost like taking the audience along for a ride in her imagination, she said.

“I have gotten that reflection from people before, and that feels really good,” Jade said. “I am writing for me, personally. It is what I do. It is how I process the world. I was up till 3 a.m. last night because I had a song idea, and I couldn’t go to sleep until I finished it. That is just how I operate. It is kind of involuntary for me. It just happens.”

What’s in a name?

Jade is the artist’s middle name. Her original name was Searra Jade Gisondo, but she changed her first name to Samara about the time she turned 30, and she drops the Italian surname on stage.

“It was an evolution, but now I am really happy,” she said. “I feel like I have landed on my soul’s name, and it feels really good, especially having moved to a new place, and it has been really seamless to introduce myself as Samara.”

Jade grew up in upstate New York and moved to North Carolina after high school. She spent about a decade there, finishing college and working on her musical career, before she made her way to Port Townsend, where she is wintering for the season.

“I released an album, “Wave of Birdsong,” I changed my name, it was all around a time of big transition,” Jade said. “I shaved my head right around that same time, six months ago. It seemed like a big soul reset, and coming out here has been a really nourishing thing, especially coming to a place where I already knew people. I feel really welcomed here.”

She has found shelter in an upstairs room at the home of Laurence Cole, founder of PT Songlines, whom she first met along with local musician Aimee Ringle during a music gathering about four years ago on the East Coast.

“I really hit it off with them and loved what they were doing as far as song leading,” Jade said. “That was a new thing to me, but I started sharing songs with them, and they started sharing my songs, and my songs made it out here before I ever did.”

During Jade’s first musical tour of the West Coast, she played a few gigs with Ringle in Port Townsend.

“I just fell in love with the area,” Jade said. “That was like 3 1/2 years ago, and I have come back a bunch of times since then, spending incrementally more time until I ended my one-way tour this summer in Port Townsend.”

Jade said the audiences in Port Townsend are in tune with her music style.

“It is nice when people listen,” she said. “That has actually been a really wonderful thing about playing out here in Port Townsend. There is a deep appreciation for music I have found almost more than anywhere else. Even playing at bars ... you could hear a pin drop in the bar. Everybody is listening. I am just pleasantly surprised. I am really grateful for the audiences out here. It is a neat thing.”

Genreless

Jade couldn’t commit to a musical style.

“I was just talking about this the other day because I had done a post on Facebook a number of years ago when I was in the first processes of trying to get my music out to the world,” she said.

“It is folk, but it is also blues and jazz, and it's definitely got an intellectual nerdy element to it because of the things I write about. A friend of mine said, ‘How ‘bout philosofolk?’ and I thought it was really kind of funny and started using it as a joke. But then, it kind of stuck. But in a more basic way, I often say soulful folk. It is hard to classify it at all.”

Whatever the style, Jade prefers to express it with a guitar in hand.

“I have played piano and banjo, too, but I find I do most of my writing on the guitar,” she said. “It is just such a versatile instrument, and I come from a number of different musical backgrounds, from jazz guitar to folk and blues and electric guitar. It really just lends itself to a lot of different genres of music, which suits me.”

Her favorite instrument is an acoustic guitar made by Seagull, a Canadian guitar manufacturer.

“This is my trusty old Seagull,” she said, strumming a few reverberating notes with her right hand. “I have had this guitar since I was 18, and as you can see, it is kind of beat up. I got it for $300 at a used guitar store, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It is the most valuable thing in my life. Not monetarily, but otherwise.”

The guitar is named “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” after the book of the same name by Richard Bach, Jade said.

Jade currently uses steel strings but will use nylon strings on occasion.

“It depends on the tuning,” she said. “I do a lot of open tuning stuff, and that works better on the steel strings, but the nylon is nice for the more jazzy stuff and bossanova.”

Busy, busy, busy

Although she has taken some personal time off to plan her future, Jade has kept busy with playing numerous gigs around Jefferson County during the past several months.

“She arrived in Port Townsend in the summer of last year and has been very steadily weaving herself into the music scene here,” said Gretchen Sleicher, PT Songlines co-director.

Jade collaborated with PT Songlines for a Jan. 19 concert in Port Townsend.

“Watching her work, she is a true working musician, it is her livelihood,” Sleicher said. “She is networking with other musicians and digging around very consistently, and then she will go off on a tour and wow people wherever she goes.”

Sleicher said she see big things for Jade in future.

“What strikes me about her is her unpretentiousness combined with her dedication to getting her music out in the world,” Sleicher said. “I don’t know exactly how she will be weaving herself into the world of song, which is very different these days. It is not like you have to have a big contract with a big-time recording studio to gather an audience of appreciative listeners of your music. She is doing that pretty organically.”

While Jade does perform solo concerts, she said she prefers having other musicians on stage with her.

“I am actually a collaborator by nature,” Jade said. “Samara Jade is my solo project, but often I have other people playing with me, and that is kind of my ideal thing. Back in Asheville (North Carolina), I have a really wide network of people I play with, and so most gigs, especially back there, I play with a band. But since I have been here, it has been kind of like starting over. I have found some musicians I really like playing with out here. When I play with a band, I am just having fun.”

A rolling stone

Jade already is planning her next adventure for spring.

“I finally got a van a couple of years ago which has been a dream of mine, to be a bum living in a van since I was a teenager,” Jade said. “That is my home in the warmer weather when I am on the road. I love being on the road.”

Jade said Port Townsend has become her winter base to which she may return in the future.

“I need to give myself a little bit of a winter to map out my gear and apply to festivals and figure out how long I am going to tour,” she said. “It is a busy time.”

For Jade, the future truly is an open road.

“I feel blessed that I don’t have anything tying me down, children or a partner, because I can go wherever, and that frees me to go where the music sends me,” she said. “That is kind of what I have been doing. That has been the journey for the last few years. If I can play a gig there, I will go there.”