New singer Ellie Goulding is a really fantastic talent. Check her new video for single, Under The Sheets out 2 November, and, below, check the interview featured in the brand new issue of RWD, out now.

There’s much more to 21 year-old Ellie Goulding than songs about breaking up with boys and broken hearts. This singer, songwriter and producer pours the truth, and nothing but the truth into her ace songs, discovers Hattie Collins…

Yes, yes, we know there’s a plethora of pop princesses clogging up the charts these days; the female of the songwriting species is here, there and everywhere right now. But so what? How many boys do we have warbling at any one time? How many indie kids with guitars do we nod along to? And when a female performer is as good as Ellie Goulding, then it’s a fact we should celebrate rather than castigate. The utterly epic excellence of Starry-Eyed,produced by herself and Starsmith (Diana Vickers/ Wynter Gordon), and a transformative reworking of Passion Pit’s  Sleepyhead got blogs like Hypemachine super-buzzing a few months back. Now her ace new single, Under The Sheets, a kind of skewed, synth-based Romeo & Juliet ’09, is tipped to push Ellie over the pop precipice.

“There isn’t really a plan, only time will tell how people will respond. If it stays as good as it has been then I guess I’m on a winner, at least a while,” insists the incredibly likeable, self-confessed hypochondriac (last week: a brain tumour turned out to be sinusitis]. “If not… well, then I’ll see what happens….”

Starting life as a clarinet player until “I realised the sound of it really irritated me”, the obsessive record collector and fan of everyone from Björk to The Cranberries, Pearl Jam to Beyoncé, cut her first demo at 14 with “some folk musician” from her hometown. Quickly quitting the idea of cutting it as a singer after everyone – her mum and friends included – told her she couldn’t sing, Goulding recaptured her confidence a few years later after winning a singing contest while studying at Canterbury College in Kent. Snapped up by Calvin Harris’ management, and thrown onto the touring circuit, Ellie started writing her own songs, soon attracting the attention of Jamie Lilywhite, son of Steve ‘U2’ Lilywhite and the now deceased singer Kirsty McColl.

Switching management teams a year ago, the last 12 months have seen Goulding rise to near-cult status on blogs, with her ‘folk-electronica’ sound and soulful vocal winning over legions of fans, not least her brand new record label, Polydor. “The buzz happened so fast and out of our control, it just seemed to spiral,” says the bemused health freak who enjoys jogging at least 10k a day. “Maybe there’s a sense of female empowerment there, but I don’t craft my songs to actively try and be something people will like or ‘relate’ to…”

Sensing from a young age she was “the black sheep of the family – but in a good way”, Ellie pours her upbringing into her music; including an absent dad. “I was so different from my family from an early age, I never wanted the easy life that they all seemed to have,” she muses. “So my music is inevitably going to reflect that somehow, someway.” Dealing with her dad on a track called Family, Goulding admits that a lack of father figure has had a big impact on her life and lyric-writing. “Not having a male figure has definitely affected a lot of things,” she admits. “It’s the one mystery in my life, and that’s why he doesn’t want to be a part of our lives. He was a musician who never made it, so it could be bitterness or it could be that he just wanted to forget he had kids,” she shrugs. “I don’t understand how a man can forget that he has three children. It’s so bizarre. I’m not bitter anymore though, I’m just interested.”

While the Murakami reading, martial art musician’s debut album is still in the making, expect to hear plenty of sharp sounds from Burial, Theophilus London and Frankmusik, who she met after messaging on MySpace. “You know how some people say ‘Listen to the music and then you’ll know what I’m about,’ and you listen and you still don’t really know? Well, I genuinely think you do have to listen to my lyrics and my music to understand what I’m doing,” insists Ellie. “I guess essentially it’s pop songs, but they’re personal. Very personal.”

Under The Sheets is out on 2 November. Follow Ellie on Twitter and hear more music on MySpace

Tags: Ellie Goulding, Interviews, Pop