“I think it’s really good to be at the bottom,” Brooke Fraser says, doing absolutely nothing to betray her long-established good girl persona, “…to play to twenty people and come back six months later and hopefully play to 50 people, and just to build things from the grassroots.” She’s talking about promoting her third album Flags, which is her first to be released in the UK and Ireland, far away from the country that has long thought of her as a national sweetheart.

Her debut album What To Do With Daylight stayed in the Top 10 for a full year in her native New Zealand back in 2003, and eventually went eight times platinum. Fraser’s second album was heavily based on a charity trip to Africa with World Vision (how’s that for do-gooder activity?), with the title-track telling the story of two girls who survived the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
“I think after Albertine I got in a bit of a rut,” she recalls. “I toured that album for a really long time but the material was quite intense in nature, so to sing something like that every night and to do it justice, to sing it with passion, that costs too. I was just so burnt out by the end of it. I needed the new songs to be songs that would – and this might sound a little bit selfish – give me something as well, that would be energising and have a buoyancy about them.”
Fraser’s vibier new sound is typified by her current single ‘Something In The Water’, which calls to mind rosy indie gems like She & Him’s ‘In The Sun’ and Feist’s ‘1234.’
“In the past I’ve written songs that were very ‘I feel this’ and ‘I think this’,” she admits, “but this time I stepped back. I’m still telling my story but I’m telling it through other people, real and imagined.”
Whatever approach she’s taking, her sweet and simple style has charmed the sequins off country smash factory Taylor Swift.
“That was a bit cool,” she laughs. “Someone sent me an interview that she’d done where she was asked to say what was on her iPod and my name was there!”
Like Swift, Fraser’s earlier material was peppered with references to God, elbowing her into the Christian music category. The certified good girl even recorded a song about her decision not to have sex before marriage.
“Nightmare of nightmares!” she exclaims, when I ask about the dreaded virgin tag. “But I’m not sorry for who I am and I’m not sorry for the music that I write.”
Counting Mumford and Sons and The Middle East among her most-listened to artists, Fraser is quick to point out that she doesn’t consider herself in quite the same category.
“I think the music that I listen to is cool but I don’t think that the music I make is cool,” she fumbles. “Perhaps it’s a slight insecurity on my part. I remember being in the studio and making this record and thinking, ‘I have to make a record that sounds like me, not me trying to interpret what is relevant or edgy.’ If I’m gonna get shot down, I want it to be for me being true to myself.”

Flags gets a live airing in The Sugar Club, Dublin on April 9. You can listen to 'Something In The Water' now on hotpress.com.