Julia Nunes strolls through the door of the rock joint du jour with her ukulele and into a world of misperceptions, misconceptions, assumptions, and pigeonholes. The world is full of female singer-songwriters. The world is full of ukulele jokes.

"I guess the biggest joke that I hear is when I say I play the ukulele, and the response I get is, ‘Oh, you're one of those girls,"' Nunes says. "The soundman sees me and I've got this tiny little thing, then they see a guy with a guitar - a dude with a real instrument..."

Then Nunes lets fly with the alto thunder.

"I start belting my voice through the whole entire room," she says. "That usually gets their attention; helps them figure out I might be the lead singer."

Julia Nunes: Rochester native, ukulele messiah, YouTube sensation, insightful songwriter, incurable wiseass. She's not just another chick with a guitar. She transcended that cluttered scene a long time ago. She's broken the mold, although she's not sure how.

"I didn't do anything on purpose. I mean, if you're just a chick with a guitar, you're just a chick with a guitar... Hopefully I'm not," she says. "I didn't do anything to separate myself from the pack. I just kept writing music about things that were important to me."

Nunes is on fire. She's packing bigger and bigger venues on the road, raised $77,000 on online fundraising site KickStarter, and will make her national television debut on Conan O'Brien's current late-night talk show on Tuesday, January 24. ("Conan" airs at 11 p.m. on TBS.) So why is the new album - packed with 18 new Nunes nuggets - called "Settle Down?" Is this frantic fraulein from Fairport actually settling down?

"No," she says. "I didn't even think of the double meaning of ‘settle down,' because it can mean settling down with a fella, having kids and a family and stuff. That's not really what I meant. I meant it in the other way, like ‘You're freaking out, settle down.' It's something people tell me a lot because I'm a bit dramatic. I get told to chill out and settle down and cool off and ‘be normal' a lot."

Normal certainly didn't get her to the national stage. It all started with Nunes's witty ukulele renditions of pop tunes by artists like Beyonce, Ben Folds, Weezer, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys, along with her powerful original songs, which went viral on YouTube. Some of her videos have received more than 2 million hits. It was the video of "Stay Awake" off the new album that got the attention of O'Brien's camp. Initially it felt like a long shot.

"The PR company that I'm working with said, ‘Hey do you have a video of your band playing your favorite song off the album? You should do that. It's the only way to get on late-night TV shows,'" Nunes says. "And I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, fat chance, I guess I'll make one.'"

"It's probably my favorite song that I've ever written, let alone off the album," she says of "Stay Awake." "It's the first anthem I've ever written. You always hear anthems for teenagers and girls and generic stuff, but this is a very specific anthem for all the people like me who stay up super late and pull all-nighters for absolutely no reason and don't care." Perhaps the wee hours are a good time to compose.

"I mostly write about relationships," says Nunes. "I think a lot of people go through life thinking, ‘What is wrong with these people? I'm doing everything correctly. Everyone else is just reacting the wrong way.' And I definitely do that. So in my songs I try to sort out what's going on with me and that person."

In other words, people are getting called out.

"There is a lot of calling out on this record," she says. "In my teen years I was writing mostly about boys and crushes, and I'm kind of at a point in my life where it's family and friends and other musicians - that's where my focus is. It's people in general, it's not romance and love. This is definitely not a heartbreak album or an I-have-a-crush-on-a-boy album. It's a people album."

And it's technically her fifth disc, if you don't count all the "baby albums from my early teenage years that no one knows about," Nunes says.

Nunes is entering an era in her career that she calls "the beginning stages of adulthood," even though her music has exhibited a lyrical maturity all along.

"Vocabulary is very important to me," she says. "I find it annoying in songs when someone uses a word like ‘good' or ‘great' or ‘bad' or ‘sad,' because there are so many better words to describe those feelings. You could use a whole sentence to really say how you're feeling, and instead you cop out? Vernacular is something that is very important to me, and I think you can see that in my songs. If you look at the library of the people I listen to, they're generally very well-spoken singer-songwriters."

In an attempt to describe Nunes in words besides good or great, some folks reach for the word "phenom." You can add that to Nunes's list of hackneyed terms she doesn't want to hear.

"That term makes me feel like a cat who might have done something silly with a ball of string," she says.

Metaphorically that's accurate. "But hopefully I'm a cat who continuously does cool stuff with a ball of string, as opposed to those one-hit wonder cats. Am I right?"

Julia Nunes

Junumusic.com