No little-sister act for singer Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles has a background in overcoming unexpected obstacles. In 2004, the soul chanteuse -- familiar to most who've heard her name as the younger sister of Beyonce Knowles -- married football player Daniel Smith when she was only 17. Later that year, she gave birth to a son, and soon the family moved to tiny Moscow, Idaho, while Smith attended college.

"We were probably the only black people there other than those on the football and basketball teams," Knowles says now, seated at a table in the restaurant of the Regent Beverly Wilshire. "There was no sense of diversity or culture."

Although her marriage ended just two years later, she made the most of her time in Idaho "focusing on being a mom" and writing songs for other acts, including all three members of Beyonce's group Destiny's Child. This week, with the release of her sophomore album, "Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams," Knowles, 22, is making public her creative response to that turbulent period.

Her goal, Knowles says, was to fashion "a mix of stuff from the '60s and '70s with electronics," an aspiration reflected in the album's lead single, "I Decided," a Supremes-style girl-group number, and "This Bird," in which Knowles croons seductively over a sample of a track by the Scottish techno duo Boards of Canada. In total, "Sol-Angel" is an appealingly freewheeling set of lightly psychedelic soul music that shares the retro-futuristic vibe of Gnarls Barkley -- not surprising considering that that band's Cee-Lo Green worked closely with Knowles on the record.

In addition to Green, the disc features production by the Neptunes, Mark Ronson and Jack Splash, a songwriting assist from the veteran Motown tunesmith Lamont Dozier and guest appearances by Bilal and Q-Tip.

"Her individualism and her honesty are what drew me to it," says Q-Tip. "She's very much her own person, and she sticks to her guns. When I heard what she had done, I was calling people like, 'Yo, you gotta hear this.' "

Knowles' sister might be one of the biggest stars in the pop universe, but she says that it was difficult to access those A-list connections. To recruit Green, for example, Knowles turned to her friend LaLa Vazquez, a former host of MTV's "Total Request Live," who happened to be staying at the Le Parc Suite Hotel in West Hollywood at the same time as Green.

Vazquez called Knowles and told her to come to the hotel right away. "So I loaded some tracks onto my iPod and we all went out," Knowles remembers.