She appeared on the Bay area scene about four years ago, an exotically pretty, shy girl with an acoustic guitar and a mysterious name:

Geri X.

She had a nebulous backstory: A Bulgarian immigrant, it was said, with some kind of trauma in her childhood. Even her age was up for debate; rumors spread that she could be as young as 15 or as old as 30 (a very young-looking 30). She wouldn't tell. Nor would she reveal much about her past. It was as if a talented kid had been dropped into the scene by a spaceship. She played countless local gigs and was amiable enough, but remained somehow remote.

And then she was gone, or mostly gone — relocated to Wisconsin with her new boyfriend and bassist/guitarist, Greg Roteik. She returned sporadically for gigs.

Now she's back.

This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2009.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...