WESTFIELD – Lexi Weege, a singer songwriter and Westfield native who writes   jazz and blues tinged tunes, first made her public debut at the age of eight. Now, at 22 years old, the local musician frequently tours across the country and makes a living from her music.

Weege told Reminder Publications her piano-based music is inspired by 1920s jazz and blues artists, but “with a lot of cursing.”

Some of her influences include bluesman Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

Weege recently completed a tour across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. A few months before that tour, she went to California and back by herself.

“I played in Kansas in May, it was one of the last dates on my tour, and upon crossing the border of Kansas you’re greeted by these really disgusting women-shaming billboards … very aggressive pro-life billboards. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh, my God. I feel like I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what they’re going to think of my music.”

That night she played at a coffee shop called Ad Astra Books and Coffee in Salina, KS, to a crowd of mostly women and girls of all ages.

“One woman said something to me along the lines of, ‘Seeing you embracing your body makes me feel that it’s okay to express myself in that way.’ I had a little girl with shaking hands asking me to sign a flyer for her. And I met all these amazing women who’ve never seen anything like what I do … It made them feel really good about themselves to see a woman just go and pull out all the stops and be completely herself.”

Weege said the show was inspiring as a full time musician and performer.

“That show happened at the end of the longest tour I’d ever done,” she noted. “I had been feeling very tired … It was amazing. It really inspired me to never take the fact that this is what I do for granted and to always approach every show, no matter how many people are there, as the best show your ever going to play. It really inspired me to take what I do seriously and to love what I do.”

When asked about the difficulties of being a full-time musician, Weege said she’s in charge of every aspect of her job from booking and promoting the shows as well as selling merchandise and traveling to gigs.

She added she released an extended play (EP) on seven-inch vinyl called “Sweet Moon” last October.

“The cool thing about that was that it was all done completely live and onto tape and it was a vinyl only release,” Weege said. “I’ve always preferred that method … My professional background is mostly as a performer so I tend to have a hard time just sitting down and digesting the piece of music. I prefer to just perform it and get more of an authentic emotional experience [out] of the song.”

Weege said she and her backing band, Zach Pine on drums and Nathan Fay on upright bass and completed around two to three takes for each song on the three-song EP.

“The whole thing took about three hours with a one-hour sound check,” she noted.

Her first full-length 10-song album, “Virgin,” was released in 2013 and was also recorded live to tape.

“As a vocalist, I’m a perfectionist in that way, but when you’re working with a time restraint and when you're working with tape you kind of have to accept one whole song as it is. You can’t go back and change anything. So, it was a little frustrating at first, but looking back on it I’m really glad that I’ve done it.”

She recorded the album during one 14-hour day at Wellspring Sound Studio in Acton, Weege noted.

Weege said she writes all of her songs almost exclusively on an old piano she purchased from a Salvation Army store she was working at several years ago.

When she writes music, the lyrics usually come first and the music after that.

She plans to record a new album or EP in the near future, Weege said. Her next project would likely include musicians Tom and AJ Del Negro, who play in local band the Jays, as well as with Weege during live performances, most recently at the Jazz and Roots Festival in Springfield.

Weege has also lately been exploring new instrumentation for her songs by writing classic country inspired songs on steel-stringed guitar.

“It’s a big risk for me professionally to just kind of throw this crazy album together with a bunch of things that don’t go together, but why not?” she added.

Weege also plays a combination of classic country heartbreak tunes from the likes of Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, and Merle Haggard, as well as cover songs by the Beatles alongside her two longtime friends Madeline LaPorte, also of The Jays, and Tom LeBeau in a band called The Franklin County Sweethearts.

For more information about Weege visit her website at www.lexiweege.com.