Life after Lilith: as she releases her second CD, Doria Roberts about winning Lilith Fair's talent search--and the rugged path since. (music).

Doria Roberts has made a life out of risky decisions. Raised on R&B, she took up acoustic guitar. Interested in business, she became a folksinger. In 1999, after she'd won the talent search at Lilith Fair, she had the chance to sign with a major record label. She decided instead to go it alone. Today, as she celebrates her new album, Alive and Well, her second release since her Cinderella moment, she has no regrets.

"I really had to sit down and make a decision, and it was a hard decision because I had been waffling for maybe three years on the issue," says the out 30-year-old. "And then Lilith Fair--playing in front of 18,000 people, seeing that it is possible--was amazing."

Roberts got to share the stage for two nights with some of Lilith's top talent--Sarah McLachlan, Sinead O'Connor, Suzanne Vega, the Indigo Girls, and Sheryl Crow. She even got to solo on both nights. But when the label reps came calling, she saw that for her, fame like theirs would come at a stiff price.

"All the questions I had, all the meetings I had, were talking about my sexuality and my image and not talking about my music, and I felt that was a really bad sign," she says. "I don't think people realize how much artists have to give up. I've sacrificed a lot--I'm not playing in front of 18,000 people on a regular basis--but I get to do what I want to do."

Roberts promptly celebrated her freedom with Radio Doria, an EP bursting with all the in-your-face queerness and political rage of a record executive's nightmares. "Radio Doria was basically my declaration of independence," she says.

The album's ferocity won't shock fans of Ani DiFranco, whose sound it echoes, but it put plenty of critics on their guard. "For people who don't know what I do, it sounded like a lot of ranting," Roberts recalls. "I had to keep explaining, over and over again, that I wasn't just walking back and forth in my room writing this stuff--this is all coming out of actual experience. That was a little frustrating, to have to explain why I was so angry, which would seem to me pretty obvious considering my demographic."

Not surprisingly, the Radio Doria experience left Roberts yearning for a mellower mood. Alive and Well is a collection of live cuts shot through with levity. She chose the title to evoke lightness and celebration, only to find the events of last fall giving her words a new emphasis.

"The title is basically about appreciating the quality of my problems, which are pretty good considering what a lot of people are going though right now," she says. In expressing her empathy with the victims of September 11, Roberts says, she's also acting on her political convictions.

"My politics and music are a push for compassion and always have been. It's not about pointing at someone and saying, `You're wrong,'" she says. "More like, `This has been my life experience as a black woman who is lesbian in America. It's a view you probably don't hear a lot, and maybe you should take a look at what's going on outside your backyard.'"

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.