For Nicole C. Mullen, the music comes first when she is writing a song.

"The music is probably the easiest for me. The words take longest," she says. "Sometimes I can write a song all in the same day. Sometimes it takes a year and a day."

She gets inspiration from all kinds of things - a phrase, a Bible story, or even looking at the countryside from her front porch. A drive down a country road inspired "Family Tree."

"There's a part about trees hanging over the road, and they meet each other," she says, forming a circle with her arms over her head. "It inspired a phrase: 'these are the branches of my family tree ... under the branches I can feel a breeze, where the leaves from the trees make a canopy ...'"

Her style, she says, hasn't changed much since her first Dove Award-winning song, "On My Knees," that sailed to the top of the Christian music charts.

"I think it's maybe developing and maturing. It's still a mixture of a lot of different styles," she says. "At the same time, the messages are clear, and it's still about the things of life. I think our faith is supposed to be relevant."

Mullen and her husband, David, are a songwriting team, but they never work together on a song in the same room. Sometimes David will start a song, and Nicole will finish it - which is how they wrote "Black Light," celebrating the Civil Rights movement.

"It's a mutual thing," says David, sitting in the recording studio - a former Mexican restaurant - that he is remodeling with two partners. "I come pretty much from a hard-core, Piedmont blues background, that's real acoustic and sort of a mix between Mississippi blues and what you might find in the hills of Appalachia. And she comes from a gospel background.

"What we've done is mixed it all up into this thing that she calls Funk-a-billy. If you listen, that's what it is - instruments playing what other instruments normally play, but they are mountain type instruments - slide guitars, banjos, and violins.

"Sometimes we'll put it all over hip-hop type beats. It is really an amalgamation, just like our marriage and our family."

He's hoping that Bootsy Collins will play on Nicole's next album.

"In the R&B community, everybody wants him to come down and 'lay down the funk, baby,' " he says.

Janelle Gelfand