Welcome to Her World

When singer Katell Keineg was an impressionable young girl in Wales, she went to see the Led Zeppelin concert film “The Song Remains the Same.” Staring at singer Robert Plant in all his mystical splendor, she knew she had found her calling.

“I thought he was God on two legs,” Keineg recalls wistfully, sipping tea in the midtown Manhattan offices of Elektra Records. “I thought, ‘I want to be like him.’ So I got my hair cut and permed, and I started to sing!”

The lanky, 32-year-old Keineg laughs, as she does often, revealing a smile as wide and toothy as Julia Roberts’.

It wasn’t the only time an infatuation became a musical inspiration for her.

“I essentially started playing guitar because I had a crush on George Harrison,” Keineg adds. “For years I was embarrassed to say that. But part of what draws you to music, I think, is eroticism.”

The songs on Keineg’s second album, “Jet”--which since its June release has received rave reviews and spawned a single, “One Hell of a Life,” that is fast becoming a staple of adult-alternative radio--boast an earthy sensuality that, like the music of her adolescent heroes, suggests diverse influences. A native of Brittany, France, who spent much of her childhood in Wales and has been based in Dublin, Ireland, for the past seven years, Keineg litters her lyrical tunes with Celtic, European, Arabic, African and Latin textures and imagery, and her lilting soprano voice combines the siren-like clarity of an Irish folk songstress with the sultry minimalism of a jazz chanteuse.

“People ask me if I make a conscious effort to use musical ideas from different countries and cultures,” Keineg says. “I don’t really think I do. I hate records that take that sort of approach--like, ‘Let’s get an African drummer and a Bulgarian singer.’ I don’t want to be identified with that. But I suppose that when you travel, the places that you go to become a part of who you are.”

The singer-songwriter is the daughter of French poet Paol Keineg, to whom she attributes her love of language. Her Welsh mother, a retired schoolteacher, is a local representative for Plaid Cymru, a political party seeking Wales’ independence from Britain. As children, Keineg and her older brother divided their time between the homelands of both parents; later, she went to college in London and lived in New York, where she appeared at downtown clubs and cafes and where she still stays frequently when not in Dublin.

While building a reputation as a graceful, emotive live performer in the early ‘90s, Keineg released a seven-inch single called “Hestia” on SOL, an independent label co-owned by musicians Bob Mould and Nicholas Hill. Elektra took note, and signed Keineg in 1993. The following year, she made her album debut with “O Seasons O Castles,” which made her a favorite among critics and industry insiders and led to a gig singing backup on Natalie Merchant’s 1995 album, “Tigerlily.”

For “Jet,” Keineg enlisted “Tigerlily” engineer John Holbrook and ex-Captain Beefheart associate and current PJ Harvey band member Eric Drew Feldman as co-producers. The three set up shop in a big house near Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., and spent a relatively leisurely two months recording in the living room.

“When I was making my first album, I don’t think I had enough time to reflect,” says Keineg. “This time, we didn’t have to work inhumane hours. We put in eight-hour days instead of 14-hour days, which left more time to consider things, and to change them if necessary. We could also just hang out on the porch and play music, or talk, or paint, or get drunk. The album had more life around it.”

Keineg is currently hanging out and playing music with Merchant and a host of other popular female artists on this summer’s Lilith Fair tour. For Keineg, the success of the event and the increasing prominence of women on the pop charts are part of a larger social trend. The politician’s daughter points to the significant role that female voters played in recent national elections in the U.S. and England, and the fact that there is an unprecedented number of women in the British Parliament. She acknowledges, however, that the testosterone-challenged still face certain pressures and hurdles, particularly in her field.

“It’s a difficult thing, as a woman artist, to be sexual in your own way,” Keineg says. “If you can fit into a certain stereotype, it definitely makes marketing easier. I mean, I wear push-up bras on occasion. I try not to in photos, but I do onstage. Increasingly, in fact, there is pressure to be cheesecake. I wonder sometimes whether someone like Janis Joplin would be able to make it if she came along right now.”

But in the view of Nancy Jeffries, the senior vice president of A&R; at Elektra Records who brought Keineg to the label, the singer’s own prospects have little to do with her babe quotient.

“I saw Katell perform solo with her guitar a number of times before we signed her,” says Jeffries, “and the audience response was overwhelming. She supplied a kind of reality that people were hungry for. She is one of those acts with whom you have to take a little more time and be a little bit more dedicated in your approach, but she provides the inspiration for that whenever people see her play live. A friend of mine did recently, and afterwards she told me, ‘I think I’ve just experienced the complete range of human emotions in an hour and a half.’ So I think Katell’s natural appeal to people is irresistible, and it’s just a matter of time.”

Fortunately, Keineg seems patient, and intent on remaining true to her quirky, eclectic instincts.

“I don’t really think about what’s gonna happen with my album commercially,” she says. “In some ways, I’d like to be more experimental. There are always different strands of things I’m interested in. It’s all about listening--that’s how you move forward musically. And that, really, is my job.”

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KATELL KEINEG, Troubador, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd. Date: Wednesday. Price: $10. Phone: (310) 276-6168.

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Hear the Music

* Excerpts from this album and other recent releases are available on The Times’ World Wide Web site. Point your browser to: https://www.latimes.com/soundclips