Dash of the white stuff

Then the Hawaii-born singer attributes some of this restlessness that led to her finding her voice and style.

White was living in Seattle when she first started playing the guitar at 22, fired up by Sonic Youth and The Pixies.

Years later, after addresses in Paris, London, New York and finally L.A, the musical penny dropped.

“I stopped banging away at the guitar and started finger-picking,” she recalls, ahead of her appearance at Sheffield’s Lantern Theatre on Tuesday.

“I was listening to Low and was really inspired by their delicate guitars, their breath work, the harmonies. I realised I’d been afraid to sing beautifully; I’d sort of masked my real voice with this dissonant edge.”

White started playing in clubs, bars, art house parties, hanging out with a gang of poets. “It was from another time, everyone was playing jazz and doing surrealist theatre,” she recalls.

Simone comes to Nether Edge with her second album I Am The Man, an engaging collection of heart-stopping, soulful folk loveliness.

It also has the quirky flashes and edge you might expect of someone born of a sculptor and a folk singer.

Members of a philosophical school, her parents moved the family around the U.S, lived communally, listened to only classical music and didn’t have a TV. For the pre-teen Simone that meant sneaking Beatles albums into the house and being the eternal new kid at school.

Add to that a maternal grandma who was a burlesque performer and an aunt and grandfather who ran a music publishing company that turned out songs for teen pop combos and this was a girl touched by various cultures. “I have these 45s with different acts singing my auntie’s songs about bobby socks and not getting asked to the dance,” says White.

But it was after listening to Bonnie Prince Billy’s Master and Everyone that she got an introduction and a phone number for Mark Nevers, its producer. And it was in his daughter’s bedroom she began recording I Am The Man.

“It’s hard to say what you sound like when you’re in your own self,” she says of the result.

“It’s very awkward when I’m asked, I shuffle and hum and haw and of course that’s dumb so I’ve taken to shouting ‘good music’. You have to shout it though, like you’re a badass.

“I’ve written songs a few different ways. I thought for a long time that they just came to me, bam, and some of them do.

“But I saw that I was also writing them a long time before I sat down with the guitar. They start nudging and elbowing their way in and then suddenly I’m sitting down writing it.”

Simone opens for kooky Nevada writer and vocalist Alela Diane at the Nether Edge venue ahead of her new single The Pirates Gospel, title track from her acclaimed debut album.

Local art musos Laarj Dor also play. Tickets cost 5adv.