Unhip and Unfazed : Edie Brickell’s sensitive songs with the New Bohemians may be too sweet for some tastes, but hey, what is cool, anyway?

“I don’t think it’s uncool to write about squirrels!” protested Edie Brickell--gently and decidedly--when asked if it ever struck her that a song like “Oak Creek Bra,” about a woman in her brassiere on her front porch watching rural rodents darting across the road in front of station wagons, might be perceived in some urban rock camps as, well, a little unhip.

Writing about squirrels isn’t the only potentially uncool thing that Brickell, leader of the Texas-based band the New Bohemians, has gotten away with. She has a guileless persona of the sort that a lot of older bohemians love to hate--charmingly introverted and innocent, apparently unaffected and given to writing sweet, sketchy, sensitive verse about life and rocky relationships outside the big city.

This unlikeliest of rock stars is an odd combination of gracefulness and gangliness, still as much the archetypal poetic college girl as she seemed before her surprise Top 10 hit single, “What I Am,” took off two years ago.

Two and a half million albums, tours with Don Henley and Bob Dylan, and a rumored relationship with Paul Simon (“He’s a great person and a great friend”) later, she still hasn’t lost her Texas accent or learned how to schmooze.

Asked how playing big halls on the last tour was a change from Dallas clubs, she answers: “Well, it’s not as hot.”

In both settings, her seemingly un-self-conscious performing style remained the same, with a stance so famous it’s already the stuff of parody: Smile like the Mona Lisa, sing standing with one bare foot planted firmly on the ground and the other dangling crooked somewhere in the air behind, maintain that uncomfortable-looking, peg-legged position for an entire song.

That fame hasn’t changed Brickell much should come as a comfort to those who relate to her songs as heartfelt and unusually open or unguarded.

There are those who don’t, of course; the critical community is divided between avid fans and cynical detractors. Spy magazine’s October issue, in a trend piece titled “Innocents Amok,” grouped her in with Rickie Lee Jones, Suzanne Vega, Stevie Nicks, the Roches and Joni Mitchell as part of their mythical “all-waif chorale”--a waif being someone whose deliberately childlike musical world view, bare feet and berets Manhattan sophisticates don’t buy.

New Bohemians guitarist Kenny Withrow hopes Brickell doesn’t get typed as a “diary act”--that is, as one of those artists whose lyrics read a little too much like a personal journal.

“I hope Edie’s not lumped into that too much,” said Withrow in a separate interview. “Edie can be serious, and she’s not just a little girl writing little-girl tunes. She’s smart, and she’s definitely got it together, and she can touch a lot of different subjects and emotions really well. . . . ‘What I Am’ was kind of a quirky, identifiable thing that clicked, but quirkiness isn’t really what we’re about.”

Brickell, for her part, claims not to think about her image. She doesn’t talk to her fans too much or read mail about how her songs might have affected them, worrying that “it might make me overly conscientious about what to write about, if I take a poll about what people like, what they relate to and what they don’t.”

One aspect of how she’s perceived does annoy her, though--being called shy.

“In general it’s something that comes and goes and you can’t really get a handle on it,” she said. “So I don’t want to sit here and say, ‘Yeah, I’m really shy,’ because with some people I am and with some people I’m not. And it backs me into a corner; it means you’re describing yourself somehow, and that’s limiting. It’s never something you want to say about yourself anyway. It’s uncomfortable.”

Brickell, 24, can seem generally uncomfortable in the interview setting. At breakfast at a West Hollywood hotel recently, while in town to shoot a video for the single “Mama Help Me,” she was able to finish her hot oatmeal with honey and Welch’s grape juice (which she asks for by brand name) fairly quickly, since her answers tended to be shorter than the questions.

There were pauses where she thought long and hard for an answer, before deciding that how her music hits people--pro or con--is something she doesn’t even want to ponder.

“I don’t really want to draw attention to those kinds of things. I want to let people think for themselves as far as what they see in the music and how they relate to it, and not make any comment on what I want or don’t want them to see. . . . That’s why I kind of edge around these questions.”

If Brickell avoids self-consciousness as a rule, the other band members did think long and hard about how they were perceived as a group before making “Ghost of a Dog,” their newly released effort.

The New Bohemians existed as a largely improvisational, jazzy, bluesy instrumental outfit well before Brickell was coaxed-- under the influence of Jack Daniels, she has recalled--into joining them on a Dallas club stage one night. They’d been trained at music schools and raised on Miles Davis and the Dead; Brickell, by contrast, was a wholly inexperienced SMU art-major dropout who’d never performed in public before that fateful evening.

So it was humbling when the record company insisted on appending Brickell’s name to the group’s, and the producer of their debut replaced them with studio musicians on some tracks, subduing their strong live sound in the process.

This time, said Withrow, “We definitely wanted to be taken a bit more seriously . . . maybe even rock out a little. It would be nice to appeal with this album to the college scene . . . people our age. I mean, hopefully we’re representing something of our generation.”

Brickell, though, almost seems like a premature member of the thirtysomething generation at times, so it’s not hard to imagine why the New Bohemians claim more baby-boomers than college-radio hepcats as fans. It’s easier to picture her as the stay-at-home-and-hearth, poetry-by-the-fireside type in sweater and jeans than it is in her actual occupation as pop star.

If she’s an unlikely rocker, she seems like a probable pet owner if ever there was one. The first album had her drawing of a cat on the cover, and the new one--pesky road squirrels and an occasional bird or cow aside--is filled with recurring canines, including the title dead one.

So the question begs itself. To paraphrase the Marx Brothers: Why a dog?

“I was writing a lot of the lyrics to my songs in my apartment with my door open at night, and I could hear dogs barking, I guess,” Brickell said. “Maybe they just kinda subconsciously slipped through. It was the music that was happening from the street and in my neighborhood when I was writing this stuff. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. Plus, I just think there’s something so innocent about ‘em. Or, you know, they’re like . . . just sweet.”

She doesn’t own a dog, though. “I used to have a cat, but he got run over. I can smile about it now, but it hurt a lot.” That can be heavy, it’s dutifully noted. “It is heavy! It was rotten.”

Brickell spends more time on “Ghost of a Dog” singing about rotten relationships. At the end, she’s “a prisoner of freedom” in “Me by the Sea,” a wonderful evocation of that universally weird feeling of cherishing solitude and wishing for someone to share it with--”I’m glad no one’s here, just me by the sea / But man, I wish I had a hand to hold.”

You can almost hear Spy magazine’s editors gagging. Still, Brickell’s music seems genuinely disingenuous, and her ability to write wisely about the bad stuff of romance with a marked lack of anger toward the opposite sex makes her unique and--for post-modern romantics--endearing.

“Well, anger’s so much of a waste of time,” Brickell said, “and unless I’m super-angry, I don’t feel the need to express it and put more of it out there in any kind of form. I want people to feel moved, but not to get riled up listening to somebody else’s anger. I don’t think that’s much fun. Not for me, anyway. I do want to hit some emotional corners, but there’s enough anger in the street and on the news. I don’t want to put it on my stereo. . . . Unless it’s funny. If it’s funny -angry, then I like it.”

Mightn’t she make herself a target by revealing so much?

“I don’t feel vulnerable, really. It feels good to express things that I feel like everybody feels. I don’t think these songs are overly personal or show anything but human feelings. I don’t feel exposed or anything. I don’t think I’m that different from anybody else.”

Having sold several million more records than the average anybody-else, though, has success taught her any life lessons?

“I think it’s important not to make room for any huge negative experiences. Sometimes, I know, they just happen, but if I don’t allow ‘em much room in my thoughts, then it makes it harder for ‘em to creep into my life. That’s something I’ve learned.”

And, perhaps sensing that that sounded a little too New Agey--or maybe a little too waif-like--she added, “Maybe, though, I’ve just been really lucky.”