Artist of the Week: Zee Avi

Hometown: Miri, Sarawak, Borneo
Album: Zee Avi
For Fans Of: Nellie McKay, Ingrid Michaelson, Norah Jones

Zee Avi is finally home—sort of. The 23-year-old has just returned to her new digs in Costa Mesa, Calif., while on break from the tour that’s had her on the road since May, though she's several thousand miles away from the many other places she once called home: Miri, the small town in Borneo where she was born; Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian metropolis where she moved as a 12-year-old; and London, where she attended university for fashion design. But she's been in good company since her arrival in the States last year.

“Ian is the one who brought me here and has a lot of faith in me,” Avi says of Monotone Records’ Ian Montone, who discovered the petite songstress via YouTube. Equipped only with a guitar, a ukulele and a webcam, Avi spent her post-collegiate days at home in Kuala Lumpur, writing songs and posting videos of them online. The endearing ditties earned Avi a sizeable international audience, and barely a year had passed before Montone saw the videos and invited her to L.A. to make a record with his friends at Brushfire Records.

Her self-titled debut, a joint release from Brushfire and Monotone, is out now. At Brushfire, Avi shares a roster with the likes of Jack Johnson, Mason Jennings, Matt Costa and Neil Halstead. “The Brushfire artists are just really down to earth and mellow guys,” she says from her new home base, just minutes away from where her drummer and bassist live. Recently, the labels' crews even threw a party for her 23rd birthday. “It was like a family dinner,” she says, just with a few notable guests—like Jack White, who just happened to be in town on tour and stopped in to say hi. “My jaw was on the floor for like two weeks after I met [him] because I was a really huge White Stripes fan,” Avi says. “I couldn’t believe it! I was tripping out and freaking out for a while.”

Aside from the occasional moment of gushing over rock stars, there's an edge of sophisticated maturity to Avi's conversation and music that belies her youth. She name-drops Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and she covers Morrissey’s “The First Of The Gang To Die” on her debut, and while the album boasts casual, airy instrumentation, it's laced with irony and tackles the complications of relationships—addiction, isolation, bitterness—with gusto. But Avi's not all doom and gloom, as evidenced by a recent alteration to her on-the-road reading list. “I was traveling with Notes From The Underground,” Dostoevsky's darkly existentialist novel, she says with a laugh. “I was like, ‘This is a really bad idea. I don’t think I should be traveling with this.'”

Listen to “Bitter Heart” from Zee Avi: