When Ellie Goulding was growing up in her family’s tiny, two-bedroom cottage in Hereford, her mother and two sisters used to constantly tell her to shut up with her warbling – eventually only allowing her to sing at certain allotted times. “They used to say my voice was weird,” the 23-year-old electro-folk artist recalls. “Kind of. But I laugh about it now, I think it’s quite funny. Because I suppose my voice is pretty weird.”

Fortunately, it’s the good kind of weird. On striking new single ‘Starry Eyed’, she comes across sounding like a helium-inhaling cross between Bjork and Dolores O’Riordan.
“Some people listen to the record and think that my voice has been treated with special effects in the studio,” she laughs, “but it hasn’t at all. If you come to one of my gigs, you’ll see that that’s how I sing. I’ve just started working with a voice coach and she told me that I really need to be careful because the way I sing puts terrible strain on my vocal chords.”
We’re talking to the singer shortly before she’s due to be presented with the 2010 Critics Choice Award at the Brits (she’s already topped the BBC Sound of 2010 poll). “It’s such an amazing award to win,” she says, “and I felt, in a way, that I didn’t deserve it because I haven’t even brought the album out yet. It was something I used to watch every year when I was younger so to be given it myself is just amazing.”
With a major buzz building and her album, Lights, out imminently, she’s pretty busy at the moment. “Well, I’m doing a lot of phone interviews so my brain is a little fried,” she laughs. “It’s been some busy days, some not so busy days up to now. But it’s been all full-on for the last few weeks. I did a gig last night, but I only did one song. It was for the Brits party. But at least the album’s finished so that pressure’s off, because I don’t need to be in studio anymore. I’d say it probably took a year or so. It was a very slow process.”
Goulding studied drama at university in Kent, with the intention of becoming an actor, but fell into music almost by accident. She persuaded cult dance act Frankmusic (aka Vincent Frank) to work with her just by messaging him on MySpace with an acoustic version of her song ‘Wish I Stayed’. They spent a week working together at his Croydon studio. She has also worked extensively with Katy Perry/Little Boots producer Starsmith (who co-produced Lights with Fraser T. Smith).
“I suppose I did fall into music in a way. It wasn’t something I’d planned. Though my friends will sometimes say to me, ‘Oh, when you were younger you said you really wanted to be a singer’, but I literally have no recollection of it. But I remember just singing all my life. It definitely wasn’t a planned thing, for sure, it’s just something that kind of happened, but then I embraced it completely when I realised I could make an album and people could find hope or release from my lyrics and stuff. So that’s pretty good.”
What are the album’s themes?
“What’s my album about? God, it’s about everything that’s happened to me since I was 17. It’s about awful things, and all sorts of feelings and frustrations. It’s about a million things. It’s about missing home, it’s about love and heartbreak – which I suppose is the ‘must have’ thing for any album. Because I couldn’t possibly write an album without it. It’s about my family a little bit. But there’s a couple of songs that are tearjerkers I suppose.
“You know how some people say, ‘Listen to the music and then you’ll know what I’m about’. And you listen to it, but you still don’t really know. I think you genuinely have to listen to my lyrics and my music to understand what I’m doing. I don’t think it’s what you’d expect.”

Lights is out now on Polydor. Ellie Goulding plays the Academy, Dublin on March 14 and the Oxegen festival in July.