Love and Devotion

A woman’s echoing voice commands, “Listen!” A drum loop shudders. Over a swelling keyboard progression, a clear soprano rings out in a striking mix of pride and shame: “You and I, bloodlines, we come together every time.” This is how Jessie Ware greets America.

“Wildest Moments,” the song in question, is a startling ballad of ambivalent fidelity that took over American music blogs late last year. The spare, haunting video, which featured Ware in an elegant suit rotating slowly on a chair–fulfilling her vision “of a perfume ad directed by David Lynch”–has 10.5 million views on YouTube. One of Ware’s first U.S. gigs, at New York City’s Bowery Ballroom, sold out in half an hour. Not bad for a singer-songwriter whose debut album, Devotion, isn’t physically available yet on American shores. (It’s out in the U.S. next month and is streaming on iTunes.)

“The song is about my best friend, Sarah,” says Ware, sitting backstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where the 28-year-old Brit has just rehearsed “Wildest Moments” with the Roots for her first U.S. TV appearance. “I feel like I can never be a good enough friend to her because I’m never around. This weekend, I was in a hotel room in New Jersey, so cocky because I got to watch Girls early”–Lena Dunham’s cult hit runs later in Britain– “and I texted her, ‘Sarah, I’m Hannah in this one.’ She said, ‘Please let me be Hannah,’ and I said, ‘No, you’re Marnie.’ ” She laughs. “I love best-friends songs.”

But Ware would never seem at home among the shambling 20-somethings of Girls: at this point she has too much hard-won poise and bravado, and she’s confident enough to make fun of herself. At Bowery Ballroom, she explains to the rapt crowd that she can’t do any encores because–having played Devotion in its entirety, plus a few covers–“I’ve already sung every bloody song I know.” Everyone back home seems to know those songs too: Devotion, a sultry, sinuous mix of electro-pop, soul and R&B, was a finalist for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Songs like “Still Love Me” and “Sweet Talk” mix the funk of Erykah Badu and Aaliyah with the icy synth-pop of Eurythmics, all in the service of Ware’s voice, which can wail and ruminate and enchant without ever losing its cool.

Ware’s star is rising rapidly, and not just among the celebrity cognoscenti (see below). “Today I was on the front of a British paper, and I didn’t know I was going to be on it,” she says. “My boyfriend, who’s a schoolteacher, has his students read the paper every day. So he’s handing out the paper with my mug on it and the kids are going crazy: ‘Oh my god, you go out with her!’ That’s about as weird as it gets.”

One of three children of a social worker and the BBC journalist John Ware, she got her start in her school choir at age 11. “I got a solo, a jazzy version of ‘Away in a Manger.'” Slumped on the Late Night dressing-room sofa, Ware straightens up, raises a hand and launches into an overblown melisma: “Little Lord Jeeaaassuuusss …” She laughs. “I’d probably been watching Moesha or something.”

Ware eventually hit the road singing backup for solo artist Jack Peñate, a friend from the venerable Alleyn’s School in south London. (Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine is another Alleyn’s contemporary, and Pe*ate and Ware can count Adele as a mutual old friend.) At tour’s end, Ware met the influential London dubstep producer SBTRKT. “I went round to do a session with him, and I’m not a shy person, but I just completely withdrew,” she says. “We somehow managed to get one song.” Aptly called “Nervous,” it became a huge hit in England, and it got Ware signed to Interscope. Other collaborations followed with a host of British dance who’s whos, but when it came time to do an album, she says, “I wanted to make songs that weren’t completely led by production, since I’m not a producer.”

She began writing with fellow future Mercury nominee Dave Okumu of the Invisible in his southeast London flat. “I was really green and didn’t feel very confident. So the first session began almost as a therapy session. Dave gave me a big hug. Then he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve started this thing.’ And it was the song ‘Devotion.'”

The title track lays out a strategy for the entire album: delicate, innovative production behind poised vocals. “I can sing big,” says Ware, who counts Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston among her idols, “but I wanted to pull back and have some restraint and control. You can tell a story better when it’s more intimate.” “Devotion” is proof of that: it’s a nimble, mid-tempo come-on, with a bittersweet, sunset-colored melody encircled by a galaxy of sparkling digital effects. The song does that neat pop trick of inspiring affection by offering it. “I need your devotion,” Ware sings, with quiet understatement. Few listeners could refuse her.