"I remember smelling the fire and seeing ashes fall on the tables when I was downtown singing, from the fires that were so close," she says by phone from her St. Augustine home. "I was thinking, 'So close by, somebody's losing everything, and here we are.' "

The disquieting sight affected Roth's muse. "The Fire" is one of seven songs the singer-guitarist wrote for her new CD, "Like the David." She'll perform songs from the album during a CD release concert Sunday at the Golden Lion Cafe in Flagler Beach.

Despite its melancholy setting, "The Fire" concludes on a note of optimism and gratitude.

"I think I just am an optimistic person," Roth says about the hopeful vibes that permeate her songs. "I was listening to the album myself and thinking, 'You know, there's a lot of themes of gratitude in there.' And that's the way I feel about life."

Roth's songs range from jazzy, lightly funky works akin to Norah Jones and Rickie Lee Jones, to ballads and folkie songs like Tracy Chapman and Phoebe Snow, to playful ditties like "The Lady From Space." The lyrics reference Greek myths and Plato, and Roth also drew inspiration from Michelangelo's David statue. Along with her guitar playing, the CD also features cello, violin and sax accents.

Even the mournful "Watching as We Die," which finds a violin caressing Roth's dove-like vocals, concludes on an optimistic note. And, she says, "The song 'Walk in My Shoes' is kind of a heavy song and maybe bitter, but, in a way, it's kind of positive. It sounds like a person who's had enough of negative people and doesn't want to take any more."

A Jacksonville native, Roth began dabbling with guitar at age 13 after her father, a pianist and amateur musician, bought an acoustic six-string. "And I just started taking it over," Roth says.

She learned Beatles and Kansas songs with a little help from her friends, and at age 21 studied classical guitar and voice at Stetson University in DeLand. But she didn't abandon pop and rock, and began performing professionally at age 25. Her repertoire eventually included the Beatles, Springsteen, the Supremes, Duke Ellington, Shania Twain, Ani DiFranco and others. Between spending time with her husband and two sons, Roth performs in cafes, coffeehouses and other venues from Jacksonville to the Daytona Beach area.

"I usually keep a few Bach pieces in good enough shape," she says of her classical guitar days. "I have a couple of weddings coming up. But if somebody calls me and says they are looking for a classical guitarist, I don't have two hours of repertoire for that."

When she decided to record her album, she called producer Jim Devito and told him she had 11 songs (including four written by friends) that were "kind of unusual. Some of them are stylistically different from each other. Some have unique structures and some even have holes in the middle and flaws in them. He said, 'That's OK, it'll be like the David.' And I said, "Like the David?' He said, 'Like the David -- the Michelangelo statue.' "

Devito then told her the story of another sculptor who had abandoned a block of marble in which he already had cut a big hole out of the middle. When Michelangelo was commissioned to make a sculpture of the biblical David, he inherited that marble block to do the job.

"But he had to work around the flaw," Roth says. "The sculpture ended up being what it was meant to be, because of the flaw. I thought that was just a neat idea -- of things evolving naturally around their own flaws into what they're meant to be all along."

The David story became a guiding principle, especially after Roth remembered she had long ago written a poem about a sculptor.

"The poem was kind of written about a sculptor but also kind of about myself and the way I approach doing everything, especially anything creative," Roth says. "I can't really allow myself to analyze what I'm doing. I have to throw it out there and clean it up. I have to create blindly. The album came together that way -- a lot of accidents happened."

rick.deyampert@news-jrnl.com

If you go

WHO: Elizabeth Roth concert and CD release.