Keren Ann: happy to be melancholy

Keren Ann Zeidel sits at a long cafe table, huddled in a voluminous beige-brown cape, her eyes ringed with kohl. Her black hair is cut in an uncompromising pudding bowl and her skin is as pale as an oyster shell. She looks small and delicate, almost child-like, but when she starts talking about music, she launches fluently into extended semi-philosophical monologues on the nature of art, referencing everything from film noir to Chopin. The overall effect is somewhat incongruous, like a bush-baby delivering a university lecture.

"My music is much easier to explain as a picture," she says, midway through one such monologue. "All the arrangements, textures, all the colours and the way you mix them… It's frequencies instead of pigments." She laughs, semi-apologetic, and drinks her black coffee. "I know it sounds very pretentious."

For the past 12 years Keren Ann has quietly been releasing highly acclaimed albums and building up a devoted niche fanbase. Her meticulously crafted songs, at once languorous and eerie, led to her being described as "Norah Jones for Velvet Underground fans", and her eponymous 2007 album was variously hailed by critics as "exquisite", "spine-tingling" and "intoxicating". Her songs have featured in films, advertising campaigns and TV series, most notably Grey's Anatomy and Six Feet Under. (She says she turns down requests all the time: "I said no to a shampoo advert recently because the visual wasn't interesting.") And yet, for all her success, the half-Dutch, half-Israeli singer has never received the mainstream recognition she deserves.

Now, at 37, that seems about to change. Her sixth studio album, 101, features lyrically sophisticated songs brought to life with a staggering array of instrumentation – choirs, string sections, horns, synths and pianos – that still retains the cool, controlled, noirish style that has become her trademark. Despite the self-consciously detached sound, her subject matter has an extremely personal resonance. The friction between the two elements proves strangely addictive, if unsettling, to listen to. "I only write about things I've known or experienced," she explains. "About love, loss, detachment, attachment. It will always be something I went through but I will use a narrative to make it more fun. The most important thing when you write is to be honest about what you're saying."

In the four years since her last album, her father, Dan, died of cancer. "The mourning started way before he died because he knew he was going," she says, her voice quiet and toneless. "He died in my arms, in his sleep. I was very close to my dad but this is not a mourning record. It was very hard to lose him but there were some beautiful moments before he left… I don't do mourning music. It [the sadness] is all in the composition. I don't think I can deliver in my voice something that is sad and needy. It's not in my personality."

Instead the influence of her father, a Russian-Israeli sculptor-turned-businessman, is felt in the lyrics of tracks such as "You Were on Fire", which is filled with dream-like abstract imagery of a pseudo-religious experience. "In that song I wanted something devoted but not necessarily religious," Keren Ann explains. "I went from taking care of my father in the hospital to being in the studio, taking care of my [music] arrangements. Sometimes I had to close the doors, turn off the phone and go into the music and let it do its thing."

Does she think she is melancholic?

She nods, her hair quivering. "What attracts me in general is melancholy in every form of art. With classical music, for me it's always been more Chopin and Ravel than Mozart… but I'm not at all tortured. I have my dark moments but I don't blame the world." She smiles, her red-painted lips splitting like fruit. "I would if I took a lot of drugs – you end up blaming the world for your suffering; chemicals have that effect. But luckily I'd rather have good food, good wine with friends. In the studio I can be the darkest person in the world but I don't take it outside. I think that's the woman's way of doing things. They have maternal instincts but they know how to separate being the mother and the child, the dependent and the one who's in control."

She says she is "fully satisfied" by her work and has, for the past three years, been happily married to Ross, an Israeli man with whom she "definitely" wants to have children. Such positivity is refreshing, especially from an artist who has spent more than a decade being plagued by the "up and coming" tag. "I hope this album helps create a buzz," she admits. "You never really know, it's just timing... I know I have true fans because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tour, but it was all kind of underground. Every musician wants more recognition. I think I'm ready for it."

Part of the reason it has taken so long for Keren Ann to break through is that she defies easy categorisation. The youngest of three siblings, she speaks four languages after a childhood spent in Israel, the Netherlands (where her mother, Gerda, was from) and France (where the family eventually chose to settle). The nomadic impulse has stayed with her – "I have a constant need to be attached and detached from places" – and she currently splits her time between New York, Paris and Tel Aviv.

Her early musical experiences, too, have proved lastingly influential. "Growing up, I was listening to Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. My dad listened to crooners like Sinatra, Chet Baker and Billie Holiday. My mum listened to Serge Gainsbourg, and I was attracted to his sound, the way he recorded the drum, the bass, the strings... it became obsessive for me."

After leaving school in France, she took a series of part-time jobs to make a living while she wrote music, including spells as a waitress and a maths tutor. "Whenever I liked a sound, I picked up an instrument. It was kind of natural for me because I wanted to do it so much."

After two years she was living off her music, writing and producing songs for other artists as well as playing guitar in a local band. It was not until she was 25 that she started her career as a singer.

She still keeps other projects bubbling away – in the past two years alone she has co-produced an album for the actor Emmanuelle Seigner, written scores for the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra and composed the sound design for a French television channel. "I'd managed to write some catchy songs for other people," says Keren Ann. "And I thought, with this album, why not try that for myself?"

She smiles, her big, black-ringed eyes peeping out from underneath her fringe. You have to think that, after 12 years of hard graft, Keren Ann probably deserves to ditch the "up and coming" label once and for all.