Miesha Louie has a resumé that would put a lot of indie veterans to shame.

“This album is probably the proudest I’ve been, of any recording I’ve done so far,” Miesha Louie says rather matter-of-factly. When someone as young as Louie says something like this, there’s a natural tendency (among jaded, cynical critic types, anyway) to suppress a slight smile. Except, in this case, Louie is truly saying something. Though barely scraping the quarter-century mark, the Calgary musician has five actual hard-copy releases to her credit and an impressive touring and performance resumé that would put a lot of long-term scene veterans to shame.

Mmmade for Me, Louie’s latest, was recorded at Audities in Bearspaw and is released on Winnipeg’s Transistor 66 label. It’s the second Miesha and the Spanks disc (the first full-length) and reunites Louie with drummer Justin Landstorfer from Bogart, a four-piece band the singer fronted a few years back.

“We were kind of finding our rock-and-roll feeling again,” she says. “It was where we wanted to start but because all the songs came from the acoustic stuff I’d written, it was kind of hard to figure out how to get that going.”

Apparently they figured it out pretty well. The stripped down, garage punk ’n’ roll duo delivers 10 rollicking songs that fully reaffirm the less-is-more punk rock ethos. Growing up in Invermere, Louie wrote songs on an acoustic guitar and played in a band called The Lolitas. Moving to Calgary, she was embraced by the local indie enclave, bought a telecaster and the rest, as they say, is herstory. Louie wears the “rocker-chick” mantle so convincingly that her “sensitive singer-songwriter” side may surprise those people who prefer their musical genres in neat little clearly labelled packages.

While most of the songs on Mmmade for Me express Louie’s trademark gut-spilling, soul-baring confessional approach to lyrics, “Mountain Man” stands tall and alone as a balladesque first-person biography of the title character. It’s a great song and one that means a great deal to Louie. “It’s super personal,” she says. “That’s my dad’s life story. I lost him a few years ago and I wrote that as a way to deal with it, right afterwards.”

Her father was a prospector, and while Louie was on tour with Bogart, she received word that he’d gone missing. “I didn’t even have a cellphone yet, so my Mom and my sister looked up the contact number from the Meter Records website to get a hold of Dean Rudd from the Failure, who were touring with us,” she recalls. “We weren’t even staying at the same place they were staying, so he had to call someone to get a hold of me and say ‘Your mom has something really important to talk to you about.’ We were on tour, just partying our faces off and then it was like bam,” she says, shaking her head.

After a three-day ordeal of waiting, worrying and wondering, the tragic truth was discovered: Louie’s father had been killed by a grizzly bear in the Prince George backcountry. Somehow, courageously, Louie finished the tour. “It was pretty tricky,” she says with tangible understatement, “but I think it would have been harder going home. I struggled with it a little bit, but I think in the end my dad would have wanted me to finish what I started.”

As someone who’d also chosen an unconventional career path, Louie’s father was highly supportive of his daughter’s rock ’n’ roll ambitions. As she says, “It’s the same kind of thing, a profession you kind of pay to do, so we really related on that level.” For both of them the choice was clear; “He was never going to do anything else,” she says, acknowledging the parallel.

On the threshold of an ambitious two-month cross-Canada tour, Louie sees herself continuing on this path for the foreseeable future, although her short-term goals are a tad more pragmatic. “In two years, I would like to have my driver's licence,” she admits. “I’ve never even written the test for my learner’s.” Other than that, it’s pretty much, more of the same. “I have no intentions of slowing down the momentum I’ve been building for the last 25 years,” she says. “And to be honest, I don’t really know how to do anything else, anyways.”