You'd think "poet/beatnik/ musicmaker" would be a strange career choice for someone who -- after almost 15 years in the business -- still suffers from a pretty intense case of stage fright.

But to hear the multitalented Kinnie Starr explain it, she didn't really have much of a say in the matter.

"I didn't go into music -- music went into me," says Starr, somewhat cryptically, from a tour stop in Toronto. "I never decided to be a musician. I was just doing my art."

Indeed, Starr was just "doing her art" (in her case the guerrilla-style medium of homemade stickers and graffiti) when a friend convinced her to try rhyming during an open mic freestyle night in New York in 1993.

"At the end of the night, when the mic freed up, she singled me out and I got up there," Starr recalls. "(The audience) could see I was really shy, and that it was my first time ... but everyone around was so receptive, and I was told by so many rappers and poets, 'Girl, you have a voice and you need to be doing this.' "

So supportive was the crowd, that -- despite the fact she could barely breathe -- Starr returned to the stage twice more that night and has been making a career out of her eclectic mix of hip-hop, alt-rock, spoken word and R&B ever since.

That doesn't mean she's any more comfortable on stage, however -- especially not when performing her acoustic material.

"I feel sick," she says bluntly. "And if I take a break from it, when I come back to it, I'll have sometimes as much as four days of nausea and anxiety."

Regardless of the physical and mental toll, Starr says she finds "the love" on stage relaxing and she's certainly felt enough of it in recent years, working a stint with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, scoring a Juno nomination for best new artist in 2003 and releasing her latest album Anything to typical acclaim.

She was last in Winnipeg over the summer, playing the COOL Winnipeg Jazz Festival with the just-as-eclectic Buck 65 but when she plays the West End on Monday, it'll be with Inuit throat-singer Tanya Tagaq, perhaps best known for her contributions to Bjork's a cappella album Medulla.

"I was told over the years that her and I were doing something quite similar," Starr says of Tagaq. "I can see the comparison. Even though I'm not doing traditional stuff, I can see the match of spirit and intention and progressive ideas ... I'd rather tour with the artists who are f--ing with the genre they're in. That's more interesting to me."

Tickets to the Kinnie/Tagaq double-header are $12 from Ticketmaster (www.ticketmaster.ca or 780-3333) or WECC.