Remember Esthero? The Velvet-voiced Toronto Singer Tells Sean Plummer Why It's Been Seven Years Since Her Last Album And Why We Should Still Care

Esthero is fretting over Stuff. The American mag has recommended the velvet-voiced Torontonian's recent EP We R in need of a musical ReVoLuTIoN! to Ashanti fans. That's good, right? Maybe. The title track, which also appears on her long-delayed new album, Wikked lil' Grrrls (out May 24), is a melodic plea against musical mediocrity which contains these lines: "I'm so sick and tired of the s**t on the radio and MTV/ They only play the same thing/ No matter where I go I see Ashanti in the video/ I want something more."

"It wasn't meant to be a rant or a bitch," she insists over cigarettes at her local coffee shop. "You can spend all your time being sad and whining about things. I'm pretty pro-active. I'm one of those people that can look at a situation and be like 'this is s**t. How can I make it better?'"

Still, she can't help but wonder about the writer's intentions. "Is that a backhanded compliment to me? Is that a dig? Or is that digging at Ashanti fans for them to [buy] it as a joke?"

The possibilities are endless. I ask if she obsesses about everything this way. "Pretty much."

Mild kvetching aside, Esthero is in good humour and health these days. This was not always true. Just a few years ago, she admits, "my soul was in big trouble." Back in 1998, 19-year-old Esthero and her collaborator Doc (ne Martin McKinney) knocked out critics with their debut album, Breath From Another. Some people called it trip hop, but the music refused to be pinned down. Jazz, hip hop, rock and pop co-existed peaceably within the same song. It sounded original and won the admiration of music lovers and musicians alike. Sales weren't spectacular, but Esthero's voice - a supple, sensual instrument - was.

SOUND BITES The little singer with a big voice gives good quote On her depression: "I was a girl going through some dark s**t and I just needed to go through it." "You shouldn't smoke. It's bad for your karma." Esthero's 11-year-old neighbour on her elder's bad habit "What are we doing and when?" Andre 3000's reaction to Esthero's request that he sing on one of her tracks From the 'you've been warned' department: "I just issue fair warning to any man that ever had the nerve to refer to me as a bitch to my face would probably end up looking like a little bitch himself." On her track 'We R in need of a musical ReVoLuTIoN!': "There's something ironic about the fact that if I wanted to put that song on the radio, I would have to edit out the part that said 's**t', but R. Kelly's okay because he doesn't swear, he just f**ks little girls."

But Doc, a studio rat by nature, disliked touring and left. Esthero split time between her house in Toronto and an apartment in Los Angeles. She hung out in LA, started thinking about a second album, and collaborated with the likes of Black Eyed Peas, Ian Pooley, Saul Williams, Blue Man Group and Sugar Ray. When her label, WORK Group, was absorbed into Epic Records, Esthero was released from her contract. She signed to Reprise Records in August 1999.

If her professional life was turbulent, her personal life was off the Richter scale. "Here it is: I had a constant need to medicate myself, whether it be with shopping and buying useless crap, whether it be with alcohol, whether it be with Tylenol, whether it be with drugs, whether it be with talking on the phone, whether it be with eating. I could not sit still inside myself."

Now she can. Esthero, now 26, isn't much bothered by the seven-year gap between records, jokingly blaming it on "chain-smoking, nitpicking and watching CSI." In reality, much of the delay can be attributed to the artist's muse ("I'm either really working and doing stuff all the time or I'm on my couch doing nothing") combined with increasingly tight record company purse strings.

"You're at the mercy of your label... for money and to provide tools for what you need to do. There was so much stop-and-start because of that. There were a lot of times where it would just be like 'I can't do anything. I want to be in the studio, I can't be there. There's no money'."

Which is not to say that the singer, known to her closest friends alternately as Lil' Dukes Up, Tha Peachcup and Pink Pirate Estherofaerie, lives at the behest of either man or corporation. The voice behind Wikked lil' Grrrls - whose mashed-up collabos include Sean Lennon, ex-Goodie Mob member Cee-Lo and OutKast's Andre 3000 - believes that one of the most valuable lessons she's learned over the years is that craft is more important to her than stardom.

"I was born a singer, I'll die one," she insists. "I don't need the validation of millions of record sales to know that that's who I am and what I do." That said, should Grrrls' transcendent melodies and brave genre experiments translate into Ashlee Simpson-sized sales, she promises to use the resulting power for good, not evil.

"I would love to win a Grammy or be celebrated like that," she admits. "But as you get older you start to look beyond that and go, 'Okay, well, then what? What are you going to do with that?' Because that's a great amount of exposure and power that you're now wielding. So what would you do in that moment and what would you do after that? Your biggest goal can't be to stand on a stage in front of people for one night and be like [adopting a teary, award-show voice] 'Thank you so much! I'd like to thank the Academy...' I mean, who cares? What do you do the next day? Do you go buy a Mercedes or do you do something of value?"