Erin McKeown makes classic material her own.

At 28, guitarist Erin McKeown is part of a vanguard of new singer/songwriters who blissfully rummage through America’s musical closet, borrowing from jazz, folk, rock, blues and Tin Pan Alley. Raised in Fredericksburg, Va., she released her first album, 1998’s Monday Morning Cold, while still an undergraduate at Brown University, where she earned a degree in ethnomusicology. Her new self-produced CD, Sing You Sinners, is something of a left turn. Instead of her original songs, the album offers a canny tour through the back pages of the American songbook, from a slow and sassy version of Fats Waller’s “If You’re A Viper” to a hard-swinging rendition of the Anita O’Day vehicle “Thanks For the Boogie Ride.” The Weekly spoke with McKeown from her home in Northampton, Mass.

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WEEKLY: After five albums of mostly original material, you’ve recorded an uproarious CD of, well, not exactly standards, but pre-rock pop tunes. Is this the new direction for you?

MCKEOWN: The main focus of my career will continue to be writing my own songs. It’s what I love, and I feel it’s the most important thing I can do. Doing this project has reminded me of what can happen if you dedicate yourself to creating a body of songs. If they’re good enough, they’re going to last a long time. That’s what I want to do as an artist.

WEEKLY: Where did you discover “Thanks For the Boogie Ride”?

MCKEOWN: I found out about Anita O’Day because my grandfather is big band aficionado. Long before I did this project, he was finding me old songs because he’d love to hear his granddaughter sing them. He gave me a CD of O’Day’s greatest hits, and that opened up this huge catalog of stuff. As a singer, she takes a lot more chances than Ella Fitzgerald. I’m not slamming Ella at all. She’s by no means vanilla, but somehow O’Day seems a little more wild to me, a little more unbound, and that’s the spirit I wanted to bring to these songs.

WEEKLY: I can see the affinity. Ella has this spectacular instrument that you just glory in, while O’Day had a small range, and she had to make all these interesting choices about what she was going to do with it.

MCKEOWN: Yeah, I’ve never been a virtuosic vocalist. I certainly think I have an interesting voice and it does all the things I want it to do, but I’m not Ella, and if I’m going to tackle these songs, what can I bring to them? I worked on assembling a really interesting musical context, with three other great players who have their own ideas, and finding more obscure songs, so my interpretation wouldn’t have to be measured against anything else.

WEEKLY: There’s one ringer on the album, your tune “Melody,” which blends right into the program and sounds like a 1930s rhythm number. Did you write it to sort of slip it in among these old songs?

MCKEOWN: Actually, I wrote it about four years ago as a stand-alone thing, a throw away. I was being a little self-deprecating, thinking, “What is it that my songs need more of?” They need more melody. So I decided to write a song about a girl or an idea of melody and how I’d want to get with her. I think as the only original it served this record better than it would an album of originals. I thought it would be a little clever surprise.

ERIN MCKEOWN performs 6:30pm Saturday at Monterey Live, 414 Alvarado St., Monterey. $13/advance; $15/at the door. 375-5483 or montereylive.net.