Rachel Goodrich wrote her first song when she was 12. Nothing was going right for her at Nautilus Middle School in Miami Beach, and the music just came out.

''It was about having a bad day at school -- so many tests, gum in my hair,'' she says. ``Everything was just wrong. Nothing good happened that day.''

So she wrote down what she was feeling.

''I thought that's what you were supposed to do, write a song,'' Goodrich says, sitting barefoot by the open doors to the balcony of her South Beach apartment, smoking a cigarette and sipping an oversized Cuban coffee. ``I didn't understand about covering other people's tunes until the end of seventh grade.''

At 25 (''I feel so crazy old,'' she says), Goodrich is still writing songs about what she feels and what happened that day. It's her way of working things out.

''If I think about a song, I get my thoughts clear and I know what I think,'' she says.

She clarifies her mind with the catchiest tunes, the oddest instruments (in addition to guitar and piano, she's fond of the ukulele, kazoo and toy trumpet), and lyrics so idiosyncratic you'd never mistake them for anyone else's.

''Where did all the time go?'' she sings in The Black Hole. ``When nobody was looking, I went behind their backs and took it all.''

''Her sound is its own thing, and it's entirely original,'' says Lolo Reskin, owner of Sweat Records music store in Little Haiti, a center for Miami's alternative music scene, where Goodrich's self-produced album, Tinker Toys, has been the bestselling CD for the past year.

'We've had people who were like `Yeah, the new Rachel Goodrich is out, I've been waiting for this for so long,' '' says Reskin. ``Not many local artists inspire that kind of admiration.''

Goodrich is beginning to inspire more than local interest. This summer she goes on a tour that includes key venues like New York's Mercury Lounge; the Rothbury Festival in Michigan, where the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and Girltalk will also play; and Los Angeles' Hotel Café, known for breaking singer-songwriters.

In July she'll produce her next record with Greg Wells, an L.A. songwriter and producer whose long list of famous clients includes Katy Perry, Rufus Wainwright, Mika, Pink and Natasha Bedingfeld.

Wells, who discovered Goodrich on her MySpace page after a friend tipped him off, ''just about fell off my chair'' when she played for him at his studio. He's enthusiastic enough about her prospects to produce her record for free and help her shop for a label in exchange for a cut if she succeeds.

''I truly think she might be one of the great new talents,'' Wells said from L.A. ``Her writing is 10 steps ahead of what most people are doing. Even though it's not super commercial, I think the music is so good it might actually be a hit. The music becomes so infectious, and there's a confidence and a silliness that's so great.''

WEIRD INSTRUMENTS

Goodrich delights in using unexpected instruments: a plastic toy trumpet from a Dumpster that a fan gave her after a show, a child's xylophone bought on the street, saucepans from her kitchen. (``I didn't have a whole lot of percussion to work with, so I just grabbed some pots and pans. It really made a lot of sense.'').

But it's not just for novelty's sake. She uses the trumpet's sharp toot and the xylophone's high-pitched jangle in a way that heightens the sound and personality of her songs.

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