Emma-Lee Moss seems distracted. She has to be back by twelve: the boiler man’s coming.

Sat in a café on Parkway, Camden, the Hong Kong-born folk-singer seemingly can’t wait to leave. One-word answers follow awkward stares over the shoulder, uncomfortable silences and glances at the watch.

“Not that long,” she tells us on how long the album took to write. “It just happened… I can’t explain,” she says of the formation of her band. Things don’t look good. This isn’t going well. Moss doesn’t really seem in the mood. Have we done something to offend? Maybe that boiler problem’s really pissed her off? Maybe she hasn’t washed in days?

Luckily we like Emmy The Great’s album. A lot. In an age more saturated with female singer songwriters than ever before, it’s refreshing to come across an artist like Emmy.

All the others (with the possible exception of Laura Marling) seem to have their little routines… Adele is an unashamed chav (sorry… fat chav); Winehouse an off-the-rails, self-destructive crack-head (lifted wholesale from so many jazz singers of the past); Lilly Allen a nauseatingly cheeky, ‘tells-it-like-it-is’ brat; Kate Nash is the intelligent, slightly shy one what plays piano; and Duffy is, well, Welsh.

The point is they all have their obvious quirks. Their own cleverly engineered hooks that constitute their individual take on the female singer/songwriter mold.

Emmy The Great – it seems – doesn’t. When she sings, it’s her own voice that we hear. When she writes, it’s her own thoughts.

Both Lilly Allen and Kate Nash – obvious products of Bedales – find it necessary to sing with that weirdly affected, wanna-be-chav twang. Where-oh-where did it come from? Amy Winehouse has somehow developed the vocal stylings of a doomed 1940s American jazz singer. Where were they on her first album?
With Emmy The Great there’s none of that. Her voice has a clarity that comes from not trying to sound like something else. Her lyrics have a resonance that comes from their simplicity. In previous interviews she’s said that she doesn’t write from personal experience. “That’s changed now,” she tells me. Nowadays she writes about what she knows… And it shows.

“It’s not like I sat down and said ‘I have changed’,” she says, “but that was before I had written the album tracks (when she told The Times she doesn’t use personal experience in her songs). You don’t always do the same thing. You don’t really work to a formula.”

Emmy The Great’s debut album was released last month. Called First Love, its thirteen songs are charged with a sadness you might assume comes from the loss of a ‘first love’. It sounds like a more mature Emmy The Great, now writing from personal experience – possibly bitter experience.

In the quite beautiful ‘24’ we have the line “One life is the cancer and the other is the knife that makes the cut”. It’s a haunting love song riddled with the anger of break-up.

Equally ‘We Almost Had A Baby’ and ‘First Love’ are filled with a sadness and a sense of regret that makes you think Emma-Lee Moss’s new-found means of drawing from personal experience must have come from a failed relationship (or two).

Added to the subtle lyrical mastery of First Love are catchy melodies at every turn. This combined with the simple piano and string arrangements and understated production makes us believe on first listen that we have another whimsical female folk singer. At second glance, though, it becomes obvious the album – with its tales of car crashes, pissing on graves and baby bargaining tools - is far darker than that.

Moss recorded the album in a month at a studio in Lancashire with her piano player, Tom Rogerson, her guitar player, Euan Hinshelwood, and The Earlies. She and her band had been staying with a friend in Manchester towards the end of their 2008 tour when they made the decision to record the album, and ended up in a near by studio as a result.

Moss recruited The Earlies having known them through their friendship with King Creosote, and says that while they were experienced in working in a studio she found the process a challenge.

“There’s was no set pattern to how we recorded it,” she says. “It really depends on the song. For us we think we really changed while we were doing it.

“It was really intense and it was beyond any of our capabilities or experience, but in a way that was part of why we did it on our own because we wanted to be just jumping in. It was probably a bit stupid though really.

“The whole experience was intense because at the beginning there were things I just didn’t know. Stuff I had no idea about, and we just had to learn it. Things about recording, things about the songs.

“But as you record you just have to learn it because we were in charge. We were literally producing it. There would literally be situations where you’d come home and be like ‘I have absolutely no idea about reverb’ and we’d have to research it by the next day.”

“So we were quite stressed, but they (The Earlies) were really relaxed – really laid back. They were really funny actually. They were great. We’d be trying to plough through and they’d just be in the control room reading up about comets or something.”

Phew! So we got a few words out of her after all then… Perhaps we’re on a roll! So then, did it feel good to get the album out finally? “Obviously!”

Err, right then, shall we go? That boiler man might be here by now.

Emmy The Great will undoubtedly be playing a festival or two, while her next London show is 19 July 2009 at Queen Elizabeth Hall
(0871 663 2500).