Tucker Finn has gone by no fewer than four different names, including one she pulled out of a hat.

She's known to the police as Catherine Doherty. That's the name they find on her driver's license when they pound on the back of her camper shelled pickup truck in the middle of the night somewhere on the road between Toronto and Nashville and find her inside on a mattress trying to get some sleep.

To anyone who's been to a Jane Waynes' foot-stompin' hoe-down she's Tucker Doherty, the singer of wrenching ballads with names like Break My Heart. But check at the registry office and Tucker comes up Sharon Anne Meunier. That's the name on her original birth certificate, the name her teen-age single mom gave her the same day she gave her up for adoption.

Tucker grew up with her adoptive family, the Dohertys, in Scarborough, Ontario and never sang a note. She wanted to be an animator, or graphic designer... or something, she wasn't sure what. She ended up with both a degree in architecture and a career as a Hollywood set designer, spending much of 1995 in Mexico City and Vera Cruz drawing sets for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.

At the age of 24 Tucker started looking for her birth mom, a search that took three years and inspired her graphic novel Can of Worms (Fantagraphics Books). The title says it all. When she finally found them, Tucker discovered that her birth parents married after giving her up and had two more children. She also discovered that bio-mom and bio-dad had little room for her in their lives.

It's no surprise that a lot of this shows up in Tucker's songs. Her music is all about trying to make sense out of a world that usually seems to make no sense at all. "I see sad things in the windows of the shops some people keep," she sings, "dusty treasures no longer treasured by no one."

Tucker started writing her own songs and singing them while she was living in Los Angeles and working in film as Catherine Doherty. She bought a four-track recorder "and started to write some typically lame first songs." She was too shy to play them for anybody or sing in public until she teamed up with Lisa Silverman to form The Jane Waynes and record a successful independent album, Cowboy Songs. The two wanted Nashville-style stage names. Lisa became Travis. Catherine looked inside her cowboy hat, saw the model name, Tucker, and took that. Later she dumped the Doherty and went with Finn, feeling a bond with the conflicted Mark Twain character Huck Finn.

In 2004 Tucker left The Jane Waynes to pursue song writing full time. With her homebase in Toronto, she is now gigging with her companion Maggie, a gimpy mutt, sleeping in the truck from time to time to save on hotel bills. Both the truck and the dog are 10 years old and have seen better days. But Tucker Finn is just hitting her stride.

Tucker is currently working on her first full-length album to be released in 2007.

She blames nothing on her parents.