In contrast with her jazz-inflected pop music, with its echoes of Billie Holiday and covers of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, Brooklyn's Madeleine Peyroux has a reputation for grumpiness, if not for being a downright curmudgeon.
Tales of sullenness and terse exchanges abound. Listeners to ABC ago between the singer and one of her most vocal fans, Angela Catterns, which left the ABC announcer floundering amid barely monosyllabic answers.
However, this reputation isn't always justified, as I discovered on a previous occasion with Peyroux. While not exactly a born conversationalist, she was approachable, if serious and a touch wary. After another year and a third album - the even more different as Peyroux takes my call.
She's not long off stage at the Queen Hall in Edinburgh, in the bus heading back to the hotel, and she's in a good mood. A few champagnes will do that for you. So, to quote a Tom Waits song she the boulevard, looking for the heart of Saturday night?
"I don't know if we're barrelling but it doesn't really matter," she laughs gaily. "After a few champagnes I'm barrelling in my own way."
better-known tales to small gasps of horror.
"That's not true," she complains, then adds with some reluctance. "If that's happened, it's always possible that I've been like that."
often.
"I drink coffee most of the time. Maybe that's the problem."
Whatever her poison, the 32-year-old - who, as myth has it, was temperamental.
Her parents separated when she was six and she and her father's house in New York, before dropping out of high school at 16 and moving to Paris, where she joined a street performance group.
returning from Paris, she waited five years before recording her debut album of jazz and pop and a bit of country, Dreamland , in 1996.
attention and all but disappeared, before returning in the wake of Norah Jones's success to record her breakthrough second album, Careless Love, in 2004.
As the press rediscovered her, the She said once that singing got her out of trouble, so presumably it's talking that can get her into trouble. "Yes, absolutely," she chortles. "That is the perfect complement to what I said.
I'm sure that is what I meant. Did I say something bad already?"
Why does talking get her into trouble?
"My understanding is pretty superficial, I guess, but what I get never manage to say with words. Art allows us to be vague or ambiguous and it shows the positivity of ambiguity, instead of demanding that we be right or wrong."
Like Diana Krall and Jones early in their careers, Peyroux has covering other songs, a comfortable way to keep things ambiguous.
of Norah Jones's writers, Jesse Harris) because she wants to avoid that kind of scrutiny?
"Oh, I don't think so," she says. "I think it's more a question of quality.
I think I choose the songs for their poetry as well as the music, so it's a question of having a great song. And that's been the way I have found my voice, being able to be an interpreter, which has its own demands, rather than being a writer. and 22 as part of the Sydney Festival.
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