Crazy is one of the more flattering things Macy Gray's been called but, asshe tells Brian Boyd, she's fighting back.
Macy Gray is not Macy Gray. Her name is Natalie McIntyre. There is a real Macy Gray out there, an elderly man in Ohio, but the only thing Natalie McIntrye knows about him is that she fell off her bike outside his house and looking up she saw his name on his mailbox. "I just thought, 'I'm taking his name', and I've used it as an alter-ego since" she says.
There was talk of law suits and all of that but the female Macy Gray waves her hand dismissively. "You can't sue over a name, that was all just talk, it's the sort of thing that happens when you get famous, among other things . . " Like what? "Well," she says as she adjusts her six-foot frame in the canteen of her record company's office, "you can do the whole bling bling thing, which I did; you can have a posse, like I did; and you can call up your friends and say 'hey, you wanna come to Europe?', like I did. But then when you go out places, people stare at you and you have bodyguards and stuff. I never wanted that, I never wanted to be a rock star, but here I am."
The 32-year-old nu-soul star and single mother of three children is focused and up for it. She arrives on time and leaves on time (a big deal in Macy Gray world), looks amazing with her big, gold-tinted Afro and urban chic clothes and is drinking, somewhat incongruously, a can of Orangina.
She breaks off from enthusing about the new White Stripes album, to smilingly inform me that she's tired of having stuff made up about her in the press.
"I've sort of given up reading my press," she says. "You just get this interpretation of who I am, this fourth-generation interpretation. I think an article is good if the writer is good, if the quotes are accurate. So the title of my new album, The Trouble With Being Myself, is about my relationship with the media, usually when there's a write-up about me, it's that I'm crazy or something. It's lazy."
She says she's tired of being dubbed "the female Prince" and finds it condescending that people play up her "individuality"; the way she sings ("a cross between James Brown and Marge Simpson" is the usual epigram); and the way she looks and the way she dresses.
The press have done her wrong, she says. Just because she's six foot she gets described as "Amazonian", just because she talks about topics usually air-brushed out of promotional interviews, she's "wild and crazy".
"Yeh, I've talked about drug use before, about being in a state of oblivion. I certainly don't want to promote that sort of thing. But neither am I going to deny it. And there were times when I could go out and dance all night with a guy and then go home and f**k him, but I can't do that anymore, because there's a bodyguard there and stuff. So you know, now I have a very tongue-in-cheek attitude about being in the public eye. And I'm not a role model for anybody.
"Like it was always written about me and my posse - having loads of people around me, but you know, I was never MC Hammer! OK, the whole bling bling thing - well the way I see it is that anyone would want that. I never felt guilty about things like that, probably because I wasn't supposed to be this big, successful singer, it was just a . . . nice surprise."
If not a mistake. She was a child prodigy - she was reading from the age of three, originally studied to be a screenwriter (it's still her dream) and at 17 moved to Los Angles from Ohio to work as a script reader for Universal Pictures. She was asked by a then boyfriend to put down a "guide" vocal on a demo tape intended for someone else. The tape was heard by somebody at Atlantic Records who signed her as a "long-term priority".
Atlantic wanted a rock album, Macy Gray gave them a soul album. Shortly afterwards her marriage broke down, and Atlantic rang to say her album wasn't being released and she was being dropped. Divorced, unemployed and with three children, she went home to Ohio where one day she got on her bike, fell off and saw a mailbox with the name "Macy Gray" .
In the strange way the music industry works - someone at Sony heard her original guide vocal demo and convinced her to go back into the studio. The result was On How Life Is featuring the stratospheric hit, I Try and earning huge global sales. Tellingly, one of the first things she did when the royalty cheques came in was to buy her first album off Atlantic and lock it away in a vault.
Gray specialises in intensely emotional three-minute love dramas, combining the lyrical sassiness and the upfront manner of a Mary J Blige with the sturm und drang vocal exposition of a Janis Joplin. "I think it's the stories in the song that do it," she acknowledges.
"I could always talk my way into or out of anything. I've been writing since I was a little kid. I've always been very personal with the stories, always about love and relationships and stuff."
With song titles such as Gimme All Your Lovin' Or I Will Kill You, she admits she's invariably the more intense partner in any relationship. "If you look through all my lyrics, you'll see that it's always the case, as in real life, that I've given more than I should have given to somebody and this is something I only ever learn after the fact."
Her second album, The Id (2001) was a "challenging" work, mixing as it did Freudian concepts with funk and German marching music (!) and didn't repeat the commercial success of her début, but Gray feels that because this new one "was very hard to make", it's a better album. "With the first album, I didn't know shit, with the second one I was just having a blast - and a few temper tantrums - but with this, I feel there's a really happy vibe to the music even if it is a melancholy album. So much was going on in my life when I recorded it. It's funny the way there can be happiness even in a sad song, you used to get that with Sly Stone a lot.
"But I still feel that I don't fit in as a 'rock star' or whatever," she says.
"One of these days I'm going to get myself cloned so I can hang out with myself and get to know me better . . ."
The Trouble With Being Myself was released yesterday on the Epic label