"I have a really bad mouth," chuckled Nancy Atlas over a plate of calamari one sunny afternoon last week. Taking a set break from her performance at Sharkey's on Napeague, the singer-songwriter mused about having to tone down her lyrics at such family-oriented places.

That might mean substituting "stuff" for its more familiar four-letter synonym, she said, or maybe mumbling a bit on a line like "lovers make me feel betrayed so I'm gonna give up love and just get laid."

Ms. Atlas can't help it. Her honest, straight-from-the-hip approach to songwriting lends itself to such frankness. The 26-year-old has been turning that approach into a solid body of stylized songs, and in the process has emerged as the newest star on the music circuit here.

Cultivating Confidence
With two record companies interested in her tape and a local following eager to spread the word, Nancy Atlas might be a name worth keeping in the back of your head. If there is anyone thoroughly convinced she has a shot breaking into the forbidding record business, it's the songwriter herself. Many of those who have seen her perform at Amagansett's Stephen Talkhouse or elsewhere share her confidence.

The Talkhouse has become a home base of sorts for Ms. Atlas. The club's coffeehouse-style "acoustic Mondays" have featured her and a number of aspiring songwriters for the past year, providing a valuable venue and exposure.

"The Talkhouse has been so awesome for me," said Ms. Atlas. "There are a lot of talented people out here, and Gene [Hamilton, the organizer of the acoustic showcase] has really opened up a credible venue for them. A lot of people pooh-pooh the open-mike thing, but it's really valuable."

Eludes Stereotypes
Ms. Atlas is clearly at the head of the class in the weekly showcase, and her powerful material has been called upon for more important appearances. The blond-haired performer has served as an opening act this summer for Richie Havens, Patti Larkin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Mary Black - all formidable songwriters themselves. She has also performed in New Orleans and New York, including at the hot music club of the moment, the Mercury Lounge.

Part of Ms. Atlas's appeal - other than her attractive and easygoing stage presence - is her ability to elude stereotypes. She can play the fragile and introspective folk singer as easily as the swaggering rock-and-roller, but on stage she seems perfectly in the middle. Her songwriting displays the same versatility, a quality Ms. Atlas knows is important.

"There's a definite system to writing," she said. "You know there are going to be those hook songs that everyone's going to hum. Then there are those cerebral songs where you reveal your darkest secrets."

Travels Abroad
Some of the wisdom that Ms. Atlas draws from may have come from her years studying and traveling abroad. Having grown up in Commack, a "classic overachiever," Ms. Atlas decided after high school to do something different.

"I didn't think football games and frat parties were my speed," she said. Deciding to study abroad, she was accepted to Cambridge University in England. After only a semester, however, she found it too constricted and she went to study at the independent Richmond International College.

Through Richmond, Ms. Atlas took a year of study in Florence, where she studied painting and art history. During her time abroad, she also traveled more, visiting Morocco, Egypt, and other countries.

First Guitar
Though painting was, and still is, a love, it wasn't her calling. "I was one of those people. I was doing the best I could do. I had to choose something, and it wasn't field hockey," she said.

It wasn't until her last semester back at Richmond in London that she decided to pick up a guitar. "I've been musically inclined since I can remember," she explained. She had played viola for seven years in school and used that to teach herself piano. Songwriting had also been a high school hobby.

Yet it didn't all come together until Ms. Atlas bought her first guitar (yes, second-hand) at a shop on London's Portobello Road.

Self-Taught Singer
"I had always wanted to play guitar, and this was a rite of passage for me," she said. "I thought, I don't know where I'm going after this or what I'm doing. I don't know if I'm going to be washing dishes somewhere in France." So she taught herself guitar at 21, and began to put her long-simmering songwriting ideas into practice.

Though she never thought of being a singer (a "closet bathroom type" at best), "the more I sang the more people seemed to enjoy it," she said.

There's a lot to like in Ms. Atlas's voice. Complementing the range of her music, her voice moves easily between a gentle, melodic croon and a sexy rasp evoking Janis Joplin and Joan Osborne. All of it is pulled together by a breathiness that swirls around her lyrics and gives them added emotion. Like her guitar playing, her singing is self-taught.

By the time the songwriter returned to the States in 1992, she had abandoned painting for her new calling. "Painting, I love it, but it was never from the belly," she said. That same year she met a producer, who saw her potential but had different ideas for what to do with it. Although it never panned out, Ms. Atlas said she learned a good deal about the record business by working with him most important, not to lose your integrity.

"That's what happened with the producer I was working with," she recalled. "He wanted to make me into a disco girl. I said, 'You know what, let Janet Jackson be Janet Jackson.' "

Still Herself
Though she is still bent on being discovered, it won't happen by simply imitating what's popular in pop music today, she said.

"You write good music and do the best you can," she explained. "You can't go changing yourself every minute just to fill a niche. I'm not like 'Oh, Jewel is out now, maybe I should get more acoustic.' "

Jewel, incidentally, is a 24-year-old songwriter who was virtually unknown until she broke through this year to become one of the top female performers in the industry. Two years ago, she played at the Pike in Bridgehampton to a crowd of about a dozen. It only takes a listen to the radio these days to know the market is ripe for female performers.

Conflict Inside
That doesn't make getting heard by the record companies any easier. Yet Ms. Atlas has managed to interest two companies - Capitol and Arista Records - in her work. "I have a tape in and it's being listened to," she said, noting that that alone is an accomplishment. Representatives from Arista attended a recent performance at the Mercury Lounge, "and they loved it," she said.

As with any artist with ambition, there is a tug between Ms. Atlas the artist and Ms. Atlas the businesswoman. "I think it's important to have fun with it," she said. "It's important to take your writing seriously, but not yourself." That's not hard for Ms. Atlas, who considers it a prerequisite for a performing songwriter to be "half artist, half ham."

"You'd better have a tough skin and you'd better enjoy the ride, because it's a tough business," she said.

Atlas Donned
The songwriter is serious enough about her career to have adopted a stage name. Nancy Veprek, her real name, sounded a bit too common, she said. "Primarily, it was because people had trouble remembering my name."

Atlas arose partly from the songwriter's favorite book, Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." Then, when she was watching the film "12 Monkeys" and saw "Atlas Productions" flash across the screen, that sewed it up. She tried the Nancy Atlas out for a set of gigs in New Orleans and it seemed to click.

Stage name or not, Ms. Atlas's music itself is memorable enough. She said she can spend a good three months on a song before feeling comfortable with it, and that attention shows in the careful phrasing of the lyrics and the epic feel of the music. Her songs seem easily adaptable to both the alternative-rock and folk genres - just put a band behind her and kick away the stool and Ms. Atlas can turn from soloist to frontwoman.

Confidence And Comfort
The best example of her versatility is in her would-be hit "Believe in Me." Melodic and pop-laced with a band behind it and melancholy with just a guitar, it describes a woman searching for lost confidence in another:

"Well, people say I've lost my cool/Others think that I'm just crazy/They think I've lost my mind/Yeah, well I know where I'm coming from/Insecurity's made my mouth into a pointed gun, cocked back by you."

"My songs are a lot about relationships and human experience in general," she said. "A lot of songs I'll write from watching my friends in turmoil."

In her more contemplative "Cold Comfort," she looks at those who can't find satisfaction in or out of love:

"I crossed my legs as it crossed my mind that I'm just fine even if I'm going nowhere/'cause love leaves me too much anger/love leaves me empty hangers/slammin' on the door as I leave again because/comfort keeps me and comfort kills me in the end."

Chucked Shucking
Ms. Atlas also tackles lighter subjects, such as her days dancing on bartops and losing her car keys, and, in "American Girl," vignettes from her traveling experiences: "Sticky sweet in the Spanish heat . . . the lights felt like paparazzi and the music felt like some Moroccan drug."

Living on Lazy Point, Ms. Atlas worked for several years as the manager of the Clam Bar on Napeague - a job that helped earn her the tenuous title of East Hampton's fastest clam shucker, "a title I'll gladly relinquish this year, because the only thing I want my hands being cut by these days are my guitar strings!"

Now, living with her boyfriend, Paul Hodges, in Southampton, she devotes her time solely to performing and writing, recording her material with the help of a small home studio.

"I'm never going to quit, because that's what I'm set on doing," she said. "In life, if you're lucky enough to find your calling, you have to follow it."

Getting up and to prepare for her next set at Sharkey's, she smiled. "I'm ready, I'm just waiting for Mr. Luck!"