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It's 5:30pm and Katie Melua has just finished one of the most exhaustive sound checks I've ever heard - which was an incredible performance in itself, complete with a cover of "The Love Cats" that even the Cure would applaud.

On this sultry Boston afternoon, Melua is sitting next to me on one of the velvet-leather benches upstairs at the Paradise club, where in just a few hours she will perform, her star having risen quite quickly in the UK and Europe where her single "The Closest Thing To Crazy," from Katie's album Call Off The Search, hit the top of the charts, garnering Melua a performance before and praise from none other than HRH Queen Elizabeth II, which is great, and no doubt, Melua is proud, but one senses that it is the anonymous person in the audience that matters at least as much, possibly more, than this. Melua doesn't say this, but she seems to care a great deal about the everyman/everywoman. Yet despite all this attention, Katie Melua, at only nineteen years old, remains profoundly grounded.

We've seen lesser talents and bigger egos play the role, but Melua, who disdains the successive assembly line of sexed-up and mostly identical teeny-poppers that the music industry seems to have in endless supply, is not cut of that cloth. She remains her own person. "It's just not me," she says of the industry standard of teen idols, her huge, honey-colored eyes narrowing a bit as she speaks. So who then, is Katie Melua? This is tricky: Melua, unlike so many of her contemporary counterparts, does not fit neatly into any type, either in looks or sound.

Her music is by turns London Jazz, Motown, a drop of Norah Jones, Nick Drake, her tone as dulcet and angelic as Kate Bush, a bit Ella Fitzgerald, and all with the incredible range of Sinead O'Conner and storyteller cum poet quality of Bob Dylan - a potent elixir that so far, crowds can't get enough of.

Like one of her favorite musicians, the late Nick Drake ("Bryter Layter," she says smiling), she defies definition. Drake, sadly, received the bulk of his fame after his thought-to-be-suicide overdose. Melua, though she may sing a few lines about drugs, steers well-clear of the scene.

She is a smart, studious young woman, who, one senses would rather curl up with a good book (the last, The DaVinci Code, and after that, Cracking the DaVinci Code) than snort lines - she's just not that kind of girl. She "loves to read" she says, citing Iris Murdoch as one of her favorites. This is not just another pop singer. In fact, Melua is a classically trained musician (studying in London), who began writing her own songs about four years ago with a guitar lent by a boyfriend and the aid of some mixing software on her home computer.