Over the phone from her Los Angeles home, Jenny Lewis sounds shy, guarded, perhaps a little unsure of herself. But definitely not sneaky.

At lunch in a Toronto restaurant, Neko Case seems even less so. Battling a horrible cold, she's mostly just trying to make it through the interview without passing out. And yet, both are in the midst of pulling a fast one by turning unsuspecting indie snobs into country music fans.

If you're under 35 and fancy yourself a serious music aficionado, country has long been enjoyed ironically and in small doses. It's okay to have a few Johnny Cash records on the shelves. Maybe a little Loretta Lynn, especially since the latter's resurrection at Jack White's hands. But no self-respecting snob who came of age during the early '90s "new country" boom would admit to having a real appetite for the stuff.

For Case and Lewis, irony is not part of the equation as it is for, say, Ryan Adams. Neither is pandering. Instead, they're reaching into the indie rock world and forcibly pulling fans out.

With Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, her fifth full-length album, due out in March, Case has been religiously plying the country trade since graduating from Vancouver-area punk bands in the mid-1990s. Over that time, the Tacoma-raised Chicago resident has built up a loyal following that probably doesn't read Rolling Stone, let alone Pitchfork. "It's pretty all over the map," she says of her audience. "I usually talk to people after the show, and there'll be teenage girls and then there'll be the 80-year-old guy who had his son bring him into town, and then everybody in between."

But Case also has a second fan base - the one she's developed with the New Pornographers, the Canadian indie-pop collective she's belonged to for nearly as long as she's been putting out solo records. Alerted to her vocal talents, and accepting her as one of them, the sorts of people who pack the Pornographers' sold-out shows are crossing over.

"Yeah, people tell me that all the time," Case says. "People who come to my shows come to their shows, and vice versa." Now, she's packing in crowds of young urban scenesters - as she did at a recent Toronto gig to preview material from Fox Confessor.

Lewis has taken a more circuitous route. Following a child acting career that she understandably avoids talking about, she wound up fronting Rilo Kiley - what was, in the late '90s, a pop band with folk leanings. But while Rilo Kiley guitarist and co-songwriter Blake Sennett favours sunny California melodies, Lewis is a country girl at heart. "I grew up listening to country music, and as a young girl, the female country perspectives were the strongest," she says. "And I think just being an American, it's easy to default to country music."

As Rilo Kiley has garnered a cult following and critical acclaim, her tastes have increasingly been on evidence - culminating in I Never, with Lewis doing her best Patsy Cline in the middle of 2004's More Adventurous.

Now, she's released an entire album in that vein. Save for a cover of the Traveling Wilburys' Handle with Care, performed with an all-star cast of indie friends, there's nothing remotely poppy on the new Rabbit Fur Coat; the farthest it strays is toward gospel and soul, courtesy of backup singers the Watson Twins. But the following that Lewis built up with Rilo Kiley isn't complaining. When she returns to Toronto's Opera House in March, riding high from rave reviews, the venue will be packed with the same people who saw her band play there last year.

Misidentified in some corners as a lark, Lewis' new sound is actually an evolution. "The angsty emo that we did years ago with the band, before emo became what it is, was really fun," she says. "But I think we're growing up a little bit, and hopefully the songs reflect that."

The trick is to ensure that her fans are growing up with her. Both Lewis and Case offer a novelty appeal for indie fans drawn in by their pop connections and, it should be said, their considerable good looks. (Case reportedly turned down invitations to pose for Playboy; Lewis was recently voted the No. 1 "indie rock hottie" by the popular Web site Stereogum.) But what should keep them around is their substance.

Responding, perhaps, to the vacuousness of modern rock lyrics, fans have recently placed a premium on the lost art of storytelling. Hence the emergence, for instance, of Conor Oberst as an indie-folk icon.

And nobody is better positioned to capitalize than Case and Lewis, with the former's talent for weaving folk tales and the latter's ability to meld semi-autobiographical lyrics with ruminations on God and politics.

With its emphasis on expressive vocals, country highlights those skills better than any other genre could. And as they're making the genre acceptable outside small towns, honky-tonk bars and red states, Case and Lewis might just be opening the door to a whole new wave of storytellers.