Piaf, Aretha and . . . Shara? : Shara Nelson has been hailed in her native England for her aura of melancholy and soulful purity, but she still harbors doubts about her singing.

English R&B; newcomer Shara Nelson is being called the heiress to both France’s Little Sparrow, Edith Piaf, and America’s Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Not bad for someone whose first album has been in U.S. stores for only a month.

Though Nelson, 30, doesn’t really sound like a Memorex copy of either musical icon, their emotional essence reverberates strongly in her lyrics and voice.

From Piaf, Nelson’s music borrows an aura of melancholy that shades even optimistic lyrics with sadness or foreboding. Like Franklin, she evokes a soulful purity that gives even the most banal detail an honest ring. And she can swing almost effortlessly from defiance to heartache.

In real life, it’s the vulnerable side that seems to win out.

Sitting by the pool of a West Hollywood hotel, Nelson shifts uncomfortably when asked about her voice.

“To this day, there is a part of me that is doubtful about it,” she says softly, picking absent-mindedly at a warm fruit salad. “The thing I always felt strongest about was my writing.

“It wasn’t until I was 13 or 14 and was in the studio with the people from (early rap group) Sugarhill Gang that I actually gave my voice some serious consideration. They were so flattering, I thought there might be something there.”

Though the song she recorded that day was never released, she so enjoyed the process of making music that it became a defining moment in her life. Producer Adrian Sherwood, a family friend who’d brought Nelson into the studio with the Sugarhill Gang alumni, became one of her biggest supporters.

Nelson’s songwriting efforts continued throughout her teen years, even as singing was placed on the back burner. She studied languages in college, majoring in French, but didn’t really exert herself in her studies because she knew that eventually she’d get back where her heart was: singing.

Her musical breakthrough came in the mid-’80s when she hooked up with the musicians who would eventually form Massive Attack, the highly regarded experimental dance-music outfit whose 1991 debut album is considered a landmark in the genre. Titled “Blue Lines,” it featured her vocals and three songs she co-wrote.

By the time Nelson released her solo album last year in England, she’d become something of a cult figure. The album, “What Silence Knows” (see review, Page 59) , led to nominations for best new artist and best female artist in the Brit Awards competition (the English equivalent of the Grammys).

Larry Flick, dance music editor for Billboard magazine, predicts she’ll be equally hailed in the United States.

“Shara’s album is going to blow people away,” he says. “It’s mature, it’s intelligent, it’s full of soul and emotion. It’s one of the best R&B; records in years.”

When asked about all the praise that she has received, she’s both embarrassed and blunt. “I’m not too worried about the fate of this record in the States. I know it’s not the type of thing that will happen automatically over here. I know it will take time for people to see it as I see it. I did the album with everything I had in me, and I couldn’t dilute it or change it to make it appeal to people who don’t want it.”

B orn in London to parents who were originally from Kingston, Jamaica, Nelson was surrounded by music while growing up. No one else in the family sang or played an instrument, but she spent hours listening to her father’s old jazz and R&B; records. Aretha Franklin emerged as her idol.

By 13, Nelson was already writing songs and singing in the church choir. Though she had more faith in her compositions than her voice, she really wanted to be a singer.

“I knew I’d be a singer as a child,” the soft-spoken Nelson says sitting up in her poolside chair and raising her voice to compete with nearby businessmen on portable phones.

“I was lucky enough to hear different types of music from everywhere, and I think that’s what did it. Being able to see how music touched everyone, no matter where they were or what differences otherwise separated them. That did it.”

It was while at college that she was introduced to Nellee Hooper, the record producer who created the hypnotic grooves in the late ‘80s for such Soul II Soul hits as “Back to Life” and “Keep On Movin’.”

At the time, Hooper was working with the influential, experimental dance music outfit the Wild Bunch, and he quickly brought Nelson on board.

The Wild Bunch went on to become Massive Attack, a loosely structured collective that is considered by many dance-music aficionados to be one of the most important forces in the genre in the last 10 years.

“My role was to write songs around drum beats,” recalls Nelson. “We spent most of our time in Bristol, where the guys were from, and there were all kinds of fusions going on at the time. We were very influenced by what was going on, the experimentation that was just the norm.”

Massive Attack dissolved under internal strains, and Nelson spent the next two years writing songs and trying to figure out her next step. She signed a publishing deal with the idea of writing songs for others, but people began to encourage her to record the songs herself.

Eager for creative control, she signed with the small, respected Cooltempo label. “I didn’t want to get locked in a great, big corporate machine that didn’t understand what I was doing,” she says. “Cooltempo is small, but they’ve got big machinery behind them (distribution by giant EMI), so I thought it was the most sensible thing to do.”

“What Silence Knows,” her debut album on Chrysalis/ERG, is a sophisticated, mature work. It dips into soul music archives for a classic Motown vibe that it gently, knowingly tweaks with a mixture of wariness and desperate, diminishing hope. It knows the potency of cheap (i.e., pop) music, and uses it to explore real, often dark emotions.

Nelson is already working on her second album, which she promises will be quite different. A self-described workaholic, she says her hobbies are reading and writing, both of which ultimately serve her work. She hasn’t performed live in years and says she won’t until she feels all the elements are in place.

When asked if there is an overriding theme to her work, she pauses a moment and then says, “Just getting through the world in your own way and not feeling like you have to be the same as everybody else. I think that as an adolescent or as a child, you feel you’ve got to be like everyone else, and you’d think adulthood would change all that. But it doesn’t. It’s still confusing.”*