On record Shea Seger can sound as wide-eyed as the girl next door, then shift into a timbre as experienced as the Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmons. At the start of a chat in VH1.com's music room, her skinny dirty blond self thrown into an enormous easy chair, I wondered which persona might present itself?

It turns out that young Shea mixes bashfulness with youth's self-confidence. The shifting accents don't end with the music. The London-based singer from Texas uses "actually" like some people use "y'know" and "y'know" like some people use "actually." Sentences trail to a whisper before exploding into laughter, but she's direct when asked what impressed her when she first moved to the English capital to focus on songwriting.

"I never felt so dumb, honestly," she says, "as the first week on that initial writing trip. We sat in a corner pub called the Western Arms. I'll never forget it. I hardly knew anyone. There was like 10 people sitting around the table. Two were from Austria. One guy was from San Antonio but grew up in like Quebec or something. Four people from Sweden. Three Italians. All had pretty broken English. There was this striving for communication that I'd never ever seen or experienced before.

"For once, it felt like it didn't take five beers to get everyone talking about things that mattered in life and things that remained constant within humankind regardless of where you're from, y'know? I don't know if I would say I was ashamed to be an American. But I did feel completely shafted."

Shafted?

"I felt like there's a whole world and a lot of stuff going on around the world. And we sit here and we don't have to know."

It's a long way from the tiny town of Quitman, Texas, to London, and it's even longer when you interrupt the journey with a spell in acting school in Norfolk, Va. Shea's only 21, but she's discovered that there's still a lot to learn. Living in the big city helps, hanging around the markets and movie theaters where they sell cookies instead of popcorn.

"It's a place that proposes questions to me that stretch me as a person on a daily basis," she says. "Not that I will spend my whole life there, but it's pretty amazing. It's a constant reminder when you step out of your flat or your home or whatever that the world doesn't revolve around you."

One of the Swedes sitting at the Western Arms pub was producer Martin Terefe, and the songs that Shea began writing turned into her impressive debut, The May Street Project. The album informs Shea's self-discovery with blue beats plucked from two decades of loving music. Creating it, however, could become as confused as that pub conversation.

"The biggest part of the whole process was getting a team together that could make sense out of what we wanted," she admits. "Trying to explain what we needed to do, we would say, 'OK, it's not country. We need a little of this. Maybe a little bit of that.' Most of them just stood there with a stone-cold look on their faces like, 'Girl, pick something. Do you want to do a rock record or do you want to do an R&B record?'"

If the musicians were occasionally standoffish, Shea had her producer for support. "It was one of those relationships where you can fight, and you can have different opinions and you can have them disagree and come to a conclusion at the end of the day and somehow balance it all out," she says. Terefe also provided Seger with the album's highlight, a song called "Always" that she performs as a duet with Canadian songwriter Ron Sexmith.

"Martin wrote it years ago," says Shea. "I first read it, actually, on paper. I fell in love with the story of it. Then I heard the music and well, if it was just going to be sitting on the shelf, could I do it? He said, 'Definitely.' I asked Ron if he would sing it. He said, 'We ain't got nothing to lose. I didn't write it. You didn't write it. Let's sing it.' It definitely took on a personal story for me."

"Wasting the Rain" was another song Shea turned around to relate to her own process of learning about the world, appending to the come-hither ballad a news report from the Kosovo front lines.

"A very close friend that I grew up with in Quitman had joined the military and was serving in Kosovo," she explains. "We started working on the song and I said, 'There's got to be some way to make it mean something.' I felt like that needed to be on there. It was a vital piece of history that affected me. [In the song] there are two people with bonds, and my friend is guarding the room that they're standing in. They're still two people. They didn't choose the fact that they're fighting with the rest of their country.

"I wasn't going through some sort of self-introspective therapeutic process when I was making the record. But I think some things jumped off the page when it was done. Those questions - well, some of them felt like they had gained answers and some of them felt like I had sorted out what I was trying to ask, y'know?"

And indeed, Shea Seger, recording artist, seems pretty self-possessed, even if she hasn't got the accent right yet. She signed with RCA and after releasing the album in England and touring with indie heroes James, she's ready to try the U.S. The worst side effect of promotion is "You're forced to take vitamins because I hate flying and it screws me up."

Then surely she won't mind explaining the burbling confessional single "Last Time," a cross between Ray of Light Madonna and Curtis Mayfield, in which she tries to peel herself away from a demanding lover. Is the line "Bits and pieces from the night before/ Candle wax lying on the floor" based on personal experience, or has she just seen Body of Evidence too many times?

"I'm a klutz," Shea giggles. "I'm a huge klutz and I love candles. Therefore wax often spilled everywhere. That's kind of what that's about."

I refuse to accept that answer.

And with that, Shea Seger bursts into huge, room-filling laughter.