Deana Carter is one country music cutie, all right. Just not the cookie-cutter kind.

Whatever you do, don't underestimate the blonde, blue-eyed singer, named after crooner Dean Martin by her respected session musician-father Fred Carter Jr.

"From song selections, I know within the first four bars of the song if it's for me or not," says Carter in a deceptive soft southern drawl. "For meetings, I can tell, with a lot of body language and very few words, kind of where the conversation is headed. It's like dog ears. I'm the one going, 'Oooh, okay. I know where you're going.' "

Carter, who visited Toronto recently to promote her upcoming new album, Everything's Gonna Be Alright, wowed Nashville in 1996 with her unconventionally named debut, Did I Shave My Legs For This?. It sold 400,000 copies in Canada, four million in the U.S., and the hit song Strawberry Wine won best single at the 1997 Country Music Association Awards.

Since then Shania Twain has finally hit the road, the Dixie Chicks and Lee Ann Womack have come along and artists like Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, Trisha Yearwood and Reba McEntire have maintained their strongholds. But don't even try to get her into a conversation about fierce competition.

"I do believe there's room for everybody if their intentions are right," says Carter. "That's my whole beef. I'm not being mean or jealous. I'm being somewhat territorial about our responsibility as artists to do the right thing. That is so important. There's not enough room for fluff. But there's tons of room for the real thing."

When pressed for an assessment of the current stable of country stars -- both female and male -- Carter laughs.

"I think it's a little fluffy sometimes. And believe me, I'm not excluding myself, because I'm sure people will have plenty to say about me. Boy, I'm honest and people don't like that, but so be it. I know I can lay my head down at night and feel good about the fact that I go that extra mile, and I drive people around me crazy because I'm obsessed with pushing myself to do the best I can."

Carter is back with a new single, Absence Of The Heart, which just made a "hot shot" debut at No. 59 on Billboard's hot country singles chart; a new album that's in stores Oct. 20; and a new tour that sees her opening for Alan Jackson on Saturday night at Hamilton's Copps Coliseum.

Interestingly, Everything's Gonna Be Alright includes a cover of Melanie's 1971 No. 1 single Brand New Key after Carter's label told her she needed one more song for her album.

For her part, Carter admits she's "stuck in the '70s" and likes everyone and everything from Steely Dan to Led Zeppelin to disco.

"I certainly can't listen to country music every day, all the time because it doesn't help me grow," she says. "I have to kind of mix it up. I mean I have Bjork, I've got Loreena McKennitt, I've got Bonnie Raitt, all kinds of stuff."

Wait a minute, the lovable, techno-crazed Icelandic pixie Bjork?

"I would love to work with her," says Carter. "Now you'd think people looked at me crazy about some of the songs on this album. Go tell Capitol -- I want to work with Bjork! They'd be like, 'Oh, no!' I was watching the making of this new record that she has and that's me. That's what I do. I sit there and hum like string parts and horns and things that I'm not out to play, but they're all in my head. And I know that she and I could make beautiful music together. Can you imagine? Wouldn't that be awesome?"

With Carter, it just might be.