Had a serious adult soul chanteuse of less determined nature been subjected to the onslaught of comparisons that Macy Gray has had in the two and a half months since her debut album was released, chances are she would have jacked it all in and opted for a less vulnerable career in Disney voiceovers. But Gray simply shrugs and laughs her big cartoon laugh. "Somebody said I sound like I have a hairball in my throat, somebody else said I sound like a frog, a cat, Minnie Mouse meets James Brown, Rod Stewart on helium. I've had a lot of disses, but some of them are really funny."
It must be easier to take ridicule when the ridiculers aren't truly venomous - most of them are fawning critics scrambling to come up with an accurate description of one of the most unique voices of the nineties. But if Macy Gray resembles a spliffy Marge Simpson covering Janis Joplin on her Macy Gray On How Life Is album, in conversation she's squeakier, more extreme; it's as if every syllable has to battle an army of tiny whoopee cushions in her throat before making it out into the open. "I've always talked like this," she explains wearily, answering an inevitable question before I've thought of asking it.
Gray spent her childhood, like Marilyn Manson, in Canton, Ohio: "It was a bluecollar town, clean air, very peaceful. You either grow up like your mum and dad or you get out there and let your imagination run away with you. That's why you get freaks like Marilyn Manson . . . and me." An unusually tall prepubescent, she was picked on at school and refused to talk in class for fear of voice jokes. It wasn't until the mid-1990s when, as a film student moonlighting in a jazz band, she began to sing along to her keyboardist's Billie Holiday tapes and realised that her biggest handicap doubled as her secret weapon.
In a miniature replay of Aretha Franklin's early struggles, Gray signed to Atlantic in the mid-1990s and recorded a debut with "the worst mix I've ever heard" - her A&R man and sole supporter at the label left, the record wasn't released, Gray was dropped. "That was the period when I was ready to jump off a bridge or something," she remembers through gritted teeth. "You grow up and everyone tells you you've got to have purpose, and that was what I thought I did best, so when that fell through I didn't know where I was headed." She wrote a song called Do Something - nagging chorus: "Don't let the days of your life pass you by" - which might be the dirtiest, most omnipotent joint of conscientious funk cooked up since Stevie Wonder swapped his social conscience for the secret life of plants.
When Gray's Atlantic deal fell through, she was faced with the biggest decision of her life: music or man. "My husband was a bit . . . How can I put it? He just wasn't down with me being in the studio till four or five in the morning with a bunch of dudes. That really wasn't his scene," she chuckles. "A big part of hustling your music is being out there - you got to go to parties and dinners. I can see why a lot of relationships in this business don't last - and I wasn't really even in the business; I was just another artist trying to make it. I was definitely in love, but I also like the good life. I want to live well and the only way I could see myself doing that was through music."
People tell her that Macy Gray On How Life Is changed the course of their life, made them cry, persuaded them to go back into therapy, but most just tell her how good it is to dance and smoke weed to. From shattered relationships, crumbling dreams, ennui and an obsession with death (the album's jubilant curtain call, The Letter, is about her uncle's suicide), Macy Gray has made this year's ultimate party record. Isn't that a bit worrying?
"Nehhh. Everyone thinks that death is so bad. I don't think it's going to be bad. You'll probably find it's the best thing that ever happened to you." You're not scared, then? "Uh-uh. There are so many rules on this earth and the system we have to answer to and the fact that you have to get up and go to work to survive - maybe death is a release from all that. A lot of the album is me thinking about that, thinking about finally meeting God. What are you going to say? What happens when you finally look in his eyes?"
GRAY says she believes in "God, but not religion" and has been denounced by zealots for mixing sex with god. But have no doubt about it; if He did decide to go in for a bit of hardcore copulation, On How Life Is would be on the stereo. Gray's open-minded, open-armed stirring-up of the sticky and the spiritual makes her debut at least 2,000 times as real as most other 1990s soul albums - she dives deep into every line, making its meaning resonate. "It's all right, I guess," she shrugs, when I tell her that the album makes Lauryn Hill sound like a marketing man's R&B robot.
The modest Gray clearly doesn't feel like she's "made it" yet. But there must be a bit of pride there - she must have a secret desire to play On How Life Is to the people who doubted her, the kids who bullied her at school? "Well, you want to tell people that you finally did it, but I don't really have any kind of beef with anybody in particular. I don't hold grudges."
Then she gets a light bulb of thought above her head. "There is this one girl from high school who wrote me on my website and said, `I'm so proud of you'. She used to ball up little bits of paper and throw it at my hair on the school bus. I always had a lot of hair and I'd get to school and get all this paper caught in my hair. I was too much of a wuss to get up and sock her. But I'll probably bump into her when I go back to Canton . . ." It doesn't read like a threat, I know, but the ungodly look in Macy's eyes makes it feel like one.