Listening to Julie Neumark’s debut album Dimestore Halo, savoring its greasy guitars, gut-punch beats, and vocals torn from a heart both broken and toughened by life, a question comes to mind:

What’s a girl like this doing from a place so nice?

To clarify: Neumark is actually friendly, accessible, funny and charming. In other words, she’s pretty much the kind of person you’d hope to meet if you were passing through Cincinnati, her hometown.

None of this explains Dimestore Halo, a disc so full of passion, fury, sadness and triumph that you begin to wonder whether mean streets thread through the lawn-patched, summer-cookout, backyard-fence neighborhood where she was raised.

How else could Neumark have summoned the snarl of a lover betrayed on “Dirty Laundry,” that Delta blues spirit that haunts “Bobbi,” that knack for sketching an urban panorama on “Spare Change,” and that clash of slamming drums, percolating banjo, and weeping strings, all of it “washing away my good-girl attitude,” on “Fairytale”?

It’s a mystery to Neumark too. “My upbringing was picture-perfect,” she shrugs, “from family vacations to having parents who were happily married for 33 years. Every house in my part of town was basically the same. Kids were everywhere, playing kick-the-can in the cul-de-sac.”

The problem is, of course, that nothing is perfect – not even Cincinnati. “Because everything was so nice, I put pressure on myself to be perfect, to stay within the lines and not break any rules,” she elaborates. “It wasn’t until I finally got out of town that I started to find out who Julie Neumark really is.”

First, though, she prepared for her enlightenment by seeking out and soaking up music that informed what would become her own sound. Her father had built a huge record collection, much of it from the Neumark Melody Center, the music store that his parents owned. For Julie, it was natural to start singing at the same time she began speaking. She started writing too, beginning with a perfectly-titled anthem to angst that she penned in fourth grade.

“It was called ‘Life Isn’t Fair,’” she admits, laughing. “It was all about kids spilling your lunch and being mean. I can actually still sing it.”

By the time she reached high school, Neumark had documented much of her life in song – but only as a private exercise. Figure-skating and community theater took up most of her time. And it was theater that drew her, after earning her music degree at Indiana University, to seek her fortune in Los Angeles.

She found work quickly, with a recurring role on the Lifetime series Oh, Baby, as a younger version of Cynthia Stevenson’s lead character in flashback scenes. After a while, though, her routine of temp work and acting lost its luster.

“I had gotten further than a lot of people I knew who were trying to get into the business,” she says. “But it wasn’t feeding my soul. So I dragged my friends to come and sing with me in karaoke bars. Clearly, music was still in me, wanting to get out.”

Fate, in the form of an opportunity in the theater, sealed the deal. Neumark was offered a part in a comedy, but there was a catch: She had to play guitar. Unfortunately, her experience with music had only been vocal, but typically she didn’t let that get in her way. With a straight face she assured the director that, yes, she knew her way around all six strings.

“Then I went to my brother’s apartment and stole his guitar,” she continues. “He had already taught me a few chords, but because I really wanted this part I made myself learn more.”

For the next year or so, Neumark wavered between acting and music. Looking back, she realizes that her practical side was holding her back from the inevitable: “The idea of giving up everything and starting from scratch in music petrified me. I put it off for a long time until I finally jumped across that divide.”

She landed on the other side at full speed. Her calendar filled with solo acoustic gigs, which expanded into band shows as she put her own group together. The more she wrote and performed, the harder she drove herself. She drew inspiration from Beth Hart, Dylan, the Stones, Janis Joplin, Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynne, Marc Broussard – artists whose music reflected the kind of urgency and honesty that ignites Neumark’s creativity.

“There was always this fire inside of me,” she muses. “Even in fifth grade, I remember people telling me to sing quieter. And as I started playing around L.A., a lot of people started asking me how such a big voice could come out from such a tiny person.”

Her following grew. She built a reputation for rocking clubs like the Roxy past last call. Her first recordings, a pair of EPs, reflected a talent for writing songs that further sparked her electrifying presence onstage. Clearly, Neumark was on her way – yet something was still missing, an empty piece yet to be filled in the puzzle.

The picture was completed by a sobering rite of passage. When her father, Michael, began to succumb to the cancer he had battled for five years, Neumark dropped everything and flew back to his side. “Watching my father die was a wakeup call,” she says, quietly. “It made me understand that none of us knows how long we have. That opened me up, and I allowed myself to become more vulnerable than I’d ever been – enough to have my heart broken for the first time.”

Neumark responded to her loss aggressively. First, she dedicated herself to raising money and awareness for research into esophageal cancer. That commitment continues to this day, even more effectively as her invigorated writing, singing, and living lifted her music to a higher level of intensity.

Riding the current of her own determination, Neumark wrote most of the songs on Dimestore Halo over a compressed period of one year, between 2005 and ’06. By the time she brought them to the studio, she was primed to deliver her material with an emotional focus that practically leaps from the disc the moment it’s pulled from the package.

More doors are opening for Julie Neumark. Reviewers have heralded her arrival as a rare and formidable talent. (“Neumark shines” – LA Times; “Hearing her sing makes you a believer in the song.” – Music Connection) One of her heroes, Beth Hart, showed her respect by going to see Neumark perform recently at the Mint.

And now, with Dimestore Halo, this whirlwind is about to break beyond its SoCal spawning ground, beyond the idyllic world Neumark recalls on “Cincinnati,” into every corner of the country that appreciates music that’s soulful, rootsy, and utterly original.

“What I’ve been through over these past couple of years has set off a chain reaction,” she sums up. “It’s helped me figure out who I am and what I have to say. I’ve dug deeper and found my voice. And I’ve found how to express my feelings and thoughts in ways I never thought I could before.

“That’s what Dimestore Halo is all about.”