Katie Melua

Tonight, sitting on her stage stool during a pre-concert soundcheck, overseas folk-jazz diva Katie Melua is nervous. Very nervous. Sure, she’s recently strummed her acoustic guitar for a Kremlin crowd that reportedly included Putin himself, and in her native Britain for the Queen at a televised “Royal Variety Show”— gigs so high-profile they’d give Elton John the jitters. But this San Francisco appearance was something else entirely. With her green eyes, olive skin and flowing black Carole-King-curly locks, Melua looks exotic and should. She hails from the country of Georgia, a former Soviet protectorate on the Black Sea, where a peaceful uprising recently unseated crooked president Shevardnadze and replaced him with straight-arrow Saakashvili. “And it happened without anyone being killed,” Melua marvels.

But this evening, with her mother’s assistance on lyrics, Melua was adding a new number to her repertoire — a gorgeous, lilting Georgian traditional in honor of the Bay Area’s Georgian community, a few hundred of which would be in attendance. With her proud countrymen counting on her, Melua would have only one chance to get it right. After running through a few rehearsals, the 20-year-old looks exhausted. “Here — let me take that back to the hotel for you,” insists Melua’s mom, gently prying the black-lacquer-topped six-string from her daughter’s hands. Later, at the hotel, the kid will work on the song some more. Right now, she curls up on her dressing room couch and ponders her surreal, sudden rise to U.K. stardom, ignited by her Norah Jones-ish indie album Call Off The Search and its hit single “The Closest Thing To Crazy.”

Melua, dressed all in ebony, is instantly likable, and as stunned by her own stardom as the sagelike Mike Batt who discovered her in music college. “It was so bizarre, because Mike came to my school and put on our notice board that he was a songwriter looking for an acid-rock band, a bassist and a singer in the style of Eva Cassidy,” cedes his charge, still a tad awestruck. “And the reason why the Eva Cassidy thing was so interesting to me was that the song I wanted to play him was a song I’d written about the late Eva Cassidy, called ‘Faraway Voice.’” Batt invited Melua to his home studio. And what he heard in those early sessions, he sighs, totally floored him: “There was a clarity and an intelligence in the way she sang — she came up with things that had me bursting out in complete laughter, laughing with joy that this could happen. I instantly realized just how good she was.”

“Faraway Voice” made it onto Call Off The Search, as did other Melua- and Batt-penned originals, plus appropriately smoky covers like Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.” Melua’s voice feels like a welcome spring shower, trickling crystal-clear over her cabaret-sparse arrangements and coursing with youth-blossoming vitality. It took her a while to discover this classic style, she says—her older efforts were more dance-oriented — but now that she has, she’s claimed it. But what, exactly, is it like trilling for Her Majesty? A bit anxiety-filled, Melua confesses. Co-headliners like Pavarotti, Gloria Estefan and even a reformed Osmonds didn’t faze her. But there was a tiny spotlight constantly focused on the Queen, seated in her balcony box the whole time Melua was singing. “So I kept thinking ‘Don’t look at her! Don’t look at her — she’ll make you nervous!’

“And after the show, the Queen shakes everyone’s hand. So she shook mine and said ‘Oh, I’ve heard your record on the radio.’ And I said ‘Really? Wow — that’s cool!’ And she said ‘Yes. And it’s very nice, isn’t it?’ And all I could say was ‘Ummm, I guess so, yeah … Thank you!’ She’s very small, so I didn’t find her very intimidating.”

Melua even turned the experience into a life philosophy. “I try not to get too nervous about things,” she declares. “Life’s too short. I mean, hell— I’m not in Iraq at the moment. If I was in Iraq, then I’d be nervous. And that’s the way I like to look at things these days.”