It’s not hard to do 100mph in a brand new rented Buick on an empty interstate on a Saturday afternoon. Massachusetts glows in the russet and golden foliage drop, with that late autumn light that seems to intensify everything. L7 blaring on the local college radio station just serves to incite the foot to press the accelerator, and besides, nobody in their right mind drives at the state speed limit (55 mph) – made to be broken. Next up through the speakers comes ‘Partisan’, from Katell Keineg, who is due to play one of the local campuses tonight, and is at this very moment in the midst of a soundcheck. Hence the hurry.

Musically, it’s been quite an Indian summer here, with the wind-down of a choppy Lollapolooza tour, the crass insanity of “Woodstock II”, neo-punk Greenday disrupting it, the sustained mega-hit of some anonymous Spanish monks, music via Internet, Beck, Hole, hip movie soundtracks – oh yes, and don’t forget the O.J. Simpsons of the music awards, Michael and Lisa Marie. It seems that music in post-Cobain America is suffering from a multiple personality disorder that even MTV can’t control.

Into this vortex somewhere in early autumn steps Katell Keineg brandishing a sparkling debut album on Elektra, O Seasons, O Castles, grabbing plenty of attention since its release two months ago. Lauded in everything from fanzines to college mags to Rolling Stone, Spin and even that (ahem) harbinger of contemporary Musical taste, Time, Americans are getting a blast of Katell in print that’s been wisely followed up by a US tour that has covered an impressive amount of ground, tracing a route that’s taken in Atlanta, Toronto, LA, New York, the mid-West and Chicago.

Katell plays solo around the country and is joined by musicians like Paul Tiernan on the West Coast and Chris Cunningham on the East. This month sees her hooking up with Natalie Merchant (on a pre-album tour) for the important college circuit.

Tonight it’s College-ville, USA, destination Amherst. Holyoake, Smith, Amherst, Northampton and UMass universities all lie in the immediate area, and the show has been sold out since last week. After turning off the Interstate onto Route Nine, the respectable New England country road becomes dotted with neon and fluorescence in the dusk. Up ahead the big blue and orange “Howard Johnson” sign is about as welcoming as a Dentist’s plaque, and inside, the place, which has apparently just gone up, smells of glue and paint. No bar, folks, but you do have free movie channels, Cable TV and an ice machine in the lobby for your convenience.

“I’ve been surprised by the variations of America, to be honest” admits Katell, who appears to find nothing, anywhere, alien and is “at home wherever they put me’. “It’s been great, because I really like the fact that you’re driving around in this same van from one place to the other, self-contained – across the expanse. You couldn’t drive this far in Europe without driving into the sea. Here you could keep going until Tierra del Fuego if you wanted to. Or up to the North Pole. It’s kind of wild, really.”

As the sound check finishes up, there is a crowd gathering outside the door of the auditorium who look variously squeaky-clean, computer-nerdy or baggy-pants-baseball-cap chic. The last time Katell played New York was in a sit-down venue with a sophisticated crowd comprised of everything from industry heads to multi-pierced dreadlocked-ones. Here they are wide-eyed and expectant kids, they move, they heckle and even dance.

And all this apparently without the aid of mood-altering substances! No out-of-yer-face jokers tripping around the joint. The place is clean and sober, which according to Katell has been pretty frequent for the college gigs “Pure” she calls it, with a giggle. Chris Cunningham wryly wonders who’s plotting the revolution.

“Coming to college has been great for me, though, because it’s such a change – I realise that I’m not so happy doing reserved, sedentary audiences, really. When people are sitting down, giving only a cerebral appreciation, not physically taking part with whatever – the noise, or movement – I’m just not comfortable, because I’m very physical, really and I need energy from an audience.”

When the lights are up, sound is on and the songs come and go, it’s fascinating to see just how a crowd will respond to Katell, especially when many of them may not have heard of her before, being primarily here to see Ms. Natalie Merchant, who seems to be a sort of Patron Saint of these parts. But Katell’s on-stage presence (as with her everyday one) is ineluctably charming. Her singing has the kind of force that lifts or thunders. It runs the gamut from a smoky, wise-cracking rasp punctuated by a mischievous giggle to the kind of pristine clearness that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

Tonight she is wearing a deliberately fake Gianni Versace micro-mini and a slinky fluorescent orange top, and during a Nina Simone cover, when the audience don’t seem to cop on to “sleeps all day/balls all night” she sings “sleeps all day/fucks all night” producing a wave of rather hilarious titter, Beavis and Butthead style (“she said fuck” etc.). But despite their innocent manifestation, these are the humans who move many albums off American record store shelves, and the college stations are where the most important radio-play goes on for an artist like Katell.

And there’s plenty of radio play right now of the American rock press’ current fave rave (sigh), “women in rock”. In that regard, Katell couldn’t have timed her transatlantic flight better. Rolling Stone’s last Liz Phair-cover number even had a whole special section on it. (Katell quips: “So here’s the issue to deal with all you women, and for the other 51 weeks we’ll talk about guys . . .”)

The argument, for the most part, rests on the female balls factor and whether it should be an issue. Katell’s take is along the lines that women definitely do not have them – but that never stopped any of us.

“I’m a woman, so I’m never going to be ‘the guy with the axe’. So I’m trying to find my own female way of doing it that would be as strong. Because the male rock thing is incredibly powerful, and I’m totally subject to it and affected by it, but I know I can’t do that myself. So I’m trying to figure out my own way which would be as sexually potent – because of course, it’s all to do with sex in the end, music and sex. But the guitar is very much phallic, that male sexuality thing of piercing forward – entering others – whereas the female is essentially a receiver. So the beauty is to be the receiver in a powerful way.

“But at the same time, I love the women bands that are ‘fuck you’ rock. Hole, for example, who are an expression of pure fury. Musically, they don’t do too much for me, but personality and energy-wise, I’m looking at the audience and it’s amazing . The only thing I have no time for is female “victim stuff”. That whole passive thing – “only women can suffer” – when what we should really be saying is, okay – CUT THE CRAP . . . ,” she laughs.

Between the rock directness of someone like Liz Phair and the intelligent but ethereal style, of say, Sarah MacLachlan, lies the kind of cut the crap element that Katell effuses, both as a person and within the boundaries of her songs. No victim stuff here, no pretentious posturing, just a voracious lust for life: “They say freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose/I say gather all the things you need and dive into the pool.” In ‘Franklin’, she tells of a woman taking off, out of a life which has imprisoned her like a bird. Then there are the various other gradations into darker tones, like the title track, ‘Bop’, or the bittersweet ‘Paris’ and the searing sadness of ‘Gulf Of Araby’. But the singular vibrancy of her songs also evinces a multi-hued femininity that is too smart for neat categorisation.

“The whole syndrome of the guitar-hero with his “axe” and thousands of chicks that want to get into his pants is a completely male thing – I don’t think there is a female equivalent. It doesn’t work the other way around. There’s no point in a woman getting out there and throwing the same shapes as the boys, because it’s just a bit stupid. I’m not interested in denying my own femininity so I can be one of the boys – Fuck the boys!”

The unfettered and natural sexuality of this woman onstage with guitar – acoustic or otherwise – is evident to anyone who gets to see Katell live, or takes time to explore O Seasons, O Castles. But it has, first time out at least, occasionally eluded the press here. Being defined by that monster is generally a challenge for Irish musicians – if not a problem. For instance, one US rock writer had her angle all worked out before she even spoke with Katell, and her first question was whether she knew any Celtic Myths.

Katell, who probably knows as much or little as any Dublin resident, racked her brains and eventually obliged with one from the back of her memory banks. That was the piece’s first quote and the predictability angle was the uninspired Celtic Lass routine. Even the coverage that was nearest the mark was guilty of the odd misnomer, including the mention of the dreaded word ‘folkie’.

“The unfortunate thing is that to be termed ‘folkie’ here is like the kiss of death – it’s like a dismissive term. ‘Folkie’ has become a pat on the head. I don’t want to imply that I don’t like folk music – I don’t really listen to it that much, but in terms of some amazing, beautifully written songs . . . But it’s become such a generic term, too. What is folk? You can’t even define it anymore, because so many descriptive musical terms have been usurped, or in America at least, completely banjaxed by the New Age movement. There’s this stereotype of ‘Celtic’ which involves mists, is ethereal, aery, of the past . . . all to do with the spirit, but a conception of the spirit that is completely removed from reality and earthiness etc. Which is a load of cobblers, because I think that Celtic people are, on the whole, more earthy and more bawdy and real than that.”

Meanwhile, back onstage, her performance, as usual, is punctuated by impromptu monologues of pithy or rambling nature, and either kind goes down well with the crowd, whom she inevitably enchants into submission. Accompaniment by guitarist Cunningham (Estatomatique, The Chanting House and more) bulks out the set, and that alto growl – which seems to be adding increasing amount of vocal effects to its expressive vocabulary – rises to an impossible soprano for the break in ‘O Seasons’ and prompts a round of applause from the audience. Another moment for applause comes, oddly enough, as she slings on an electric guitar for one number and likes it so much she keeps it for the next one. She sounds great.

After the show, it is evident that she has won hearts and heads all round. The male element, inevitably have their own vocabulary for their admiration, but women love Katell most for her eccentric, outgoing sexiness that blasts away old girl-with-guitar clichés, including mumbling-eyes-downcast intros or pretentious silence.

Although she is always spontaneous, the idea of performance, celebration and communion intensely interest her. “It’s that whole Dionysian thing – it’s all linked with performance. It’s almost the opposite of that ‘rock performer’ idea of having to cultivate remoteness, to suppress your humanity or your warmth – I think it’s much more transformative for an audience and a performer when you actually show yourself, and you apply yourself and not pretend to be this golden, aloof, perfect creature. The two ideas are probably not mutually exclusive, and maybe they’re intertwined, I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out in a way. I’m trying to find my own place in that.”

Of course, there is a direct reference to the Dionysius of rock himself, Jim Morrison, on O Seasons . . .

“Yeah, the whole cult of Jim Morrison is interesting to anyone who is a performer, really. There are so many paradoxes. Here was a man who, for a start, was pretty much run out of the country for supposedly showing his dick onstage to Americans, and now he’s become the American Icon of a generation. His graveside has become a complete zoo! I even saw a fashion spread with Kate Moss and a rose, draped over it. And there is a whole new generation of people who just want to be rock stars. As an ambition in itself it’s a bit . . feeble. The idea of wanting to be a celebrity for its own sake, as opposed to its being a by-product of doing what you love. It’s a weird domain.

“I was having a discussion with some musicians about the possibility of going up to play at the Bethal Woodstock – not the big one, but an alternative event at the original site in the field. And this one guy said to me, ‘oh, yeah, man, but there’s not gonna be a backstage . . .’. And I was like – but this is Woodstock!! (laughs). But he wasn’t sure that he was going to go, because there wasn’t going to be a backstage. In other words, for him the backstage was more important than stage!”

Katell’s eventual excursion to Bethal was thwarted by hurricane winds and rain, which finally made road conditions too dangerous to brave. “We had to turn around – we were hydroplaning all over Route 97! You couldn’t even see the road in front of you. But, I went up to Yasgur’s Farm, actually, to visit for the day, when we were passing by there later. I bought this toy drum kit in a shop on the way up, I’d seen it in the window and said, ooh, I’ll have that . . . so I set up my drum kit in the field and bashed away for a while, so . . . I ‘played Woodstock’, man . . . yeah, I was the drummer – in the back. Yeah, man, it was huge, huge . . “ (laughs).

Katell, who enjoys discussion of music in the abstract, is maddenly mercurial when it comes to discussing her own work in detail. What about inspiration? Underlying forces? She leans back over an impossibly colonial balcony that opens onto a very proper green lawn of the Amherst Alumni Gymnasium grounds and spoofs some Southern Belle coyness with hysterical effect. Basically she detests any kind of navel-gazing.

“I don’t like explaining things. They don’t really have an analytical meaning for me. Singing is like surfing. I never think of what they’re about unless I’m singing them and then they mean something subjective. I think songwriting is usually about where you want to be rather than where you are. It’s always based in the personal, but expresses an aspiration as well.”

Which seems to be pretty clear, if we are to go by lines like “I won’t accept at this stage/anything that isn’t all I want” . .

“I’m pretty up and down as a person, it depends on which time you would approach me! The world is very complicated, and if you don’t have a very strong sense of yourself, it can be very frightening. It’s easy to despair. So I suppose, like everybody else, I’m looking for ways out of that.”

This is perhaps what will distinguish her from being lopped in with the generic slew of “females in rock”, that’s haunting any young female musician at the moment. It is her craft as a songsmith, her poetic flair and simply the spark of her personality that will set her apart and perhaps gives her an edge over other artists in the US. She already has half of the songs she needs ready for her next album, and will break from touring in late spring for a few months to complete the material.

In terms of inspiration, she cites various contemporaries, world music artists, gigs she’s seen over her current stay, the North American autumn, and oddly enough, US road travel. Romanticised, unique, unparalleled, perhaps. But inspiring?

“Superficially, it’s all just motels and fast-foods etc. But if you take time to look at the details, you’ll find that places are always different from each other. I love all the place names. Amazing. Looking at the map and seeing the wacky names of the towns. There were three little towns, Oriental, Seven Stars and Maize – all in a row – and you think, God. What were these people on??!!” n

• Katell Keineg returns to Dublin for Christmas to play at Whelan’s 20 and 21 December, followed by a series of New Year appearances around Ireland and Europe.

KATELL: THE 60 SECOND QUIZ

The worst hotel room? Any hotel room where the cleaners come around at eight o’clock in the morning.

Worst morning? Any one that starts before noon.

Best gig played? Rutger’s University.

Best gigs seen? Beck, Dylan, The Ardoin Family (real thing – Cajun), Hole, The Whirling Dervishes of Turkey.

Fave albums in the van? Revolver, P.J. Harvey’s first album, Zeppelin III (laughs), Peter Gabriel’s Passion Sources, Beck’s album, G. Love and Special Sauce. Others from a bag of about 50 tapes.

Worst thing you saw on a screen? The worst and most bizarre things on US TV are the paid advertisement programmes, which are made like real talkshows, but are actually one long advert. They’re full of actors, so you’re not quite sure what you’re watching for a while.

Best thing you saw on the screen? Latcho Drom, a film about Romany gypsies. Absolutely the most glorious film I’ve seen for ages.

Stupidest thing that happened on tour? Leaving guitars in taxis – say no more.

Things you miss most? I don’t miss anything really. I’m in this really weird head-space where I miss nothing or no-one.

Best cultural mis-communication? There is a tendency that Irish people have to send themselves up all the time, to take the piss out of yourself. A lot of the time here, that’s translated as ‘low self-esteem’. Because you take the piss out of yourself, you apparently don’t like yourself, so they’re not sure whether they like you.