TIMES HAVE TRIED HER SOUL

The president of her record company is on the phone, a messenger with a tape of her new video is at the door, a driver is waiting to take her across town to a movie screening, and a photographer is setting up lights in her living room.

It’s a day off for Macy Gray.

“I don’t even know where everything is,” she says, stepping around two massive suitcases on the living room floor in her modest Encino home, where she has lived for a few months. “I couldn’t even find the doorbell until this morning. It’s not where doorbells are supposed to be.”

Gray, whose rally against early failure in the record business is a heartwarming success story, is a stranger in her own house because she is only there about two days a month.

The rest of the time she and her 14-piece band are chalking up frequent-flier miles, until recently forced by lack of radio airplay to woo audiences with her live shows. They’ve done an estimated 150 concerts over the last 12 months--from London to Sydney.

You’d think she might take advantage of this rare day away from concerts to relax by the pool in her backyard, but Gray is on a mission. The suitcases don’t even make it past the living room, because she’s just back from a brief West Coast tour, and she’s about to head back East for more concert dates.

The work has paid off.

Gray’s debut album, “On How Life Is” (on Epic Records), has sold more than 6 million copies around the world since its release last July, about a third of them in this country now that the elusive airplay has kicked in. Her plaintive single “I Try” was the most played song on U.S. radio in recent weeks.

She’s an imposing, big-boned woman who seems even taller than her 6 feet when her Afro is fully fluffed, but she speaks in a peculiar, high-pitched voice that makes her sound like a little girl.

That voice--described variously as “Tina Turner on helium” or “a cat with laryngitis”--gives even her most serious comments a tinge of whimsy, which is why it’s easy to think of the 30-year-old Canton, Ohio, native as something of a novelty when she is a guest on TV talk shows.

In truth, Gray is one of the most stylish and substantial pop arrivals in years. She infuses her songs with an inspired mix of old-school soul and contemporary hip-hop, drawing from such diverse strains as Al Green, Sly Stone and Billie Holiday.

Her songs explore emotional hard times and issues of self-esteem with a candor and depth rare in mainstream pop--and she delivers the songs on stage with a winning vitality and vocal command.

Off-stage, however, Gray is surprisingly reserved. One reason is that she has struggled much of her life against low self-esteem and went through some self-destructive times, including a period of drug use. And she’s still not sure she’s all that interesting.

At the end of an interview, she pauses uncertainly and asks, “Was I OK?”

Can the new toast of pop music really be that insecure?

“For a long time in my life, I did some pretty crazy things,” she says. “It’s hard to [believe in yourself] when people say you can’t do anything or that maybe you aren’t as pretty as the next girl. You get to the point of not really caring whether you would see the next day . . . always hooking up with the wrong guy . . . just being a freak.

“The record contract was like a vote of confidence, and it finally meant I had some money. I didn’t know what was going to happen to the record, but I knew it was my chance. I also was looking at my kids’ faces and not wanting them to go through what I had gone through. I think for me it was either grow up or jump off a cliff. I did my misery thing, and I’m not really interested in it anymore.”

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You know that Gray has captured the imagination of the pop world when Elton John raves about her in Interview magazine, Rosie O’Donnell devotes an entire show to her, country darlings the Dixie Chicks use one of her videos to warm up their concert audiences, and Carlos Santana is bringing her along as the opening act on his summer tour.

But getting that attention wasn’t easy.

Gray is a late bloomer who almost gave up on the music business in Los Angeles four years ago after her first album was shelved by another record company.

Fleeing a failing marriage, the pregnant Gray went home to Ohio to wait for the birth of her third child. She lived with her parents while taking classes to secure a teaching certificate.

She would probably be working on lesson plans this afternoon if she hadn’t gotten a phone call in 1997 from Jeff Blue, a Los Angeles music publisher who heard a copy of that unreleased album and was intrigued by her voice.

Even after she made last year’s heralded “On How Life Is,” however, few in the music industry felt Gray could find an audience at a time when the charts and airwaves were dominated by teen bands and hard-core rap.

That she has connected with pop fans is almost as dramatic a story as Gray’s own.

One of the key players in that tale is Polly Anthony, president of the Epic Records Group.

“Polly is a real hero in Macy’s story,” says Andy Slater, who produced Gray’s album and now manages her career. “A lot of record companies might have walked away when the album didn’t catch on immediately. But Polly and her team didn’t waver.”

Anthony won’t confirm the figure, but it is believed that Epic invested nearly $3 million in Gray for recording costs, videos and touring support last year--before she had a hit single.

“Everyone felt we had hit singles on the album, but the challenge was how do you get radio stations in America to notice a new artist who doesn’t fit the mold of the music they think their audience wants,” Slater says, on the set of a video shoot in Van Nuys for Gray’s new single, “Why Didn’t You Call Me?”

“If you are an urban station, you are playing Jay-Z or TLC. So are you going to play a female singer who is doing this ‘90s-’70s synthesis in her music? Probably not.

“If you are a pop station and you are playing Mandy Moore and Britney Spears and the boy bands, and you are appealing to 13-year-olds, are you going to play a sophisticated soul singer? That was our problem.”

The game plan was to build word of mouth, which in turn might generate enough sales to cause radio programmers to feel there was a buzz for Gray. The campaign included a performance at the launch party for Tina Brown’s much publicized Talk magazine last August. She also attracted attention by singing in a TV commercial for Baby Gap and appearing in a print ad for Calvin Klein’s dirty denim campaign. And the media loved the record.

Mainly, though, she toured.

By the fall of last year, word of mouth on the record was so strong in the U.S. that she was selling 20,000 copies a week. Still, that was far below the potential everyone saw in Gray. It also represented a poor return on Epic’s reported investment.

The momentum finally reached critical mass in January.

All the industry respect led to Grammy nominations for best new artist and R&B; female vocal. That validation nudged a few radio programmers to take a chance and add “I Try” to their playlists. Audiences responded, and other stations added the single.

At the same time, Gray also got a guest spot on “Saturday Night Live” and O’Donnell became a big champion, playing Gray’s music frequently on her show and eventually inviting the singer onto the program.

Epic Records is jubilant. The label has just released the playful “Why Didn’t You Call Me?” as the follow-up single to “I Try” and has what it feels is the most potent single, the ballad “Still,” ready to go in the fall.

Through it all, Epic’s Anthony has watched Gray blossom as a person.

“Macy is one of the smartest people I’ve met in this business,” the executive says. “She doesn’t talk about her accomplishments, because she’s modest and private. She doesn’t want to be the poster woman for fighting adversity or say she’s some sort of wonder woman. But she’s come a long, long way in terms of confidence and knowing what to do with her life.”

*

Macy Gray’s voice has always attracted attention.

Kids used to make fun of it back in Canton, where she was born Natalie Renee McIntyre on Sept. 6, 1969. Every time she would speak up in school, kids laughed.

That’s why she used her imagination to make up stories, not to daydream about being a singer-- even though she loved music, including the Motown and James Brown her parents played constantly at home.

“Macy Gray” was a name she spotted on a neighbor’s mailbox one day--and she remembered it years later when she wanted a stage name.

“There was something about the name that was cool,” she says now, sitting on a sofa in her Encino home, where most of the walls are lined with huge photos of her two daughters, ages 2 and 5, and her son, 4. “I was always making up stories, and Macy Gray would be one of my characters.”

The future Macy Gray was one of four children, raised in modest but comfortable surroundings by her father, who worked in a steel factory, and her mother, a teacher who now is director of math for the Canton public school system.

If she wasn’t making up stories, young Macy was watching MTV or old movies.

“I always figured she would do something in show biz, but I never thought it would be music,” recalls Gray’s younger brother, Nate McIntyre, who is part of Gray’s working entourage on the road. “I thought it would be something in the movies, especially after she went to California to attend film school.”

During high school, Gray found she had a talent for writing. She headed to Los Angeles after high school to study screenwriting at USC. She is a fan of the gritty realism in films by directors like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and the late John Cassavetes.

In her spare time, Gray started writing lyrics for a fellow student’s instrumental music tracks. Gray was caught off guard one day when the student, a music major, asked her to sing on a tape he was making of one of their songs.

“The idea of singing was so foreign to me that someone might as well have said, ‘Why don’t you play the kazoo on the record?’ ” Gray says.

But she was surprised to find she liked hearing her voice on the tape, and she sang on some others. One of the tapes led to an invitation to sing with a jazz group that played Sunday brunches at a Ramada Inn in Orange County.

Around this time, she discovered Billie Holiday records and was moved by the depth of emotion in the jazz singer’s voice.

But music remained a hobby.

After college, she worked at various low-level jobs in the TV and film worlds, including as a production assistant on videos by such rap artists as N.W.A and Tupac Shakur.

In her spare time she would hang out with musicians, and she eventually made another tape. It caught the ear of Atlantic Records, where she was signed in the mid-1990s. The album she made, more rock-oriented and guitar-driven than the Epic collection, was never released, and Gray was dropped from the label.

Her personal life was no more successful than her professional one. She was involved with a man she later married, and they had three children. The marriage was short-lived.

With her music career seemingly over and her marriage ended, Gray said goodbye to Hollywood in the summer of 1996. She supported herself and her children by typing papers for college students while she worked toward getting her teaching credential.

Gray got her second chance when Blue, the music publisher, called. “I was up in my room playing solitaire when my mother came to the room and said someone was calling me from Los Angeles,” Gray recalls. “I didn’t know if I wanted to try the music business again. I didn’t know if I wanted to go through all the disappointments again. But I also missed it. I had to give it one more try.”

Gray returned to Los Angeles in 1997, made another demo tape and within months had the Epic Records contract.

“It was one of those scenes you see in a movie,” Anthony says with a laugh as she recalls hearing the demo for the first time. “We were all sitting around listening to these tapes, and this voice comes out of the speaker.

“I stood up even before it was finished and said, ‘Who is her manager? Get this person on the phone. We are going to sign her.’ And it wasn’t just me. It was all of us. I think the A&R; meeting was on a Monday. We flew her to New York and met with her on Wednesday, and we saw her at a showcase at LunaPark in Los Angeles on Saturday, and we had a deal.”

Epic put Gray together with Slater, a manager-producer who worked with Fiona Apple and the Wallflowers, and work on the album began in the summer of 1998. It was a grueling, seven-month process in which Slater and Gray frequently clashed over arrangements and the sequencing of the tracks.

But there were also moments of magic.

Jeremy Ruzuma, keyboardist in Gray’s band and co-writer of some of the album’s songs, recalls the making of the demo of “I Try.”

“I remember [songwriter Jinsoo Lim] and I sitting around the studio around 3 in the morning and as soon as she started singing ‘I Try,’ our jaws dropped. I remember thinking that if anyone ever hears this song, there’ll be no stopping her.”

*

Between Gray’s infectious smile and her music’s lively, funk-driven, party-minded elements, it’s easy sometimes to miss the darkness of her lyrics. It’s odd that someone who is so reluctant to talk about her personal life can share so much of it in her music. But it’s not a mystery to Gray.

“When I am in the studio, I don’t think about what people are going to think of me or what I say,” she says. “I’m just writing what I feel, what I know. That’s the way I’ve always done with my songs.

“In film school, it was different. In movies, you’ve got to use your imagination to tell a story. But in a song, you just tell your story. That might be because I listened to so many Billie Holiday records or old soul records and they were always about what was going on. That was my schooling as a writer and as a singer.”

Like many soul and rock performers before her, Gray deals a lot with sex and salvation.

She laughs when asked if she doesn’t feel uncomfortable with the ultra-aggressive sexual appetite described in such songs as “Caligula” and “Sex-o-Matic Venus Freak.”

“I don’t think it is all that aggressive, it’s just true,” she explains. “Maybe our grandmothers were [uptight] about sex, but girls today are freaks. They want to have a good time and [expletive]. The sexual revolution and the woman’s movement was long ago. I’m always surprised when people still raise their eyebrows about stuff like that.”

On the spiritual side, Gray gives thanks in various places on the album for being rescued from her own demons. In “I Can’t Wait to Meetchu,” she sings, “I tried to live without you/What a misery it turned out to be/Sorry for the time I doubted you.”

“For a long time in my life, I didn’t have my [expletive] together . . . just doing stupid [expletive], not caring about anybody or even myself,” she says. “But I have a great relationship with God now.”

One of the most sobering tunes on the album is “Still,” a tale about clinging to an unhealthy relationship. The chilling opening line: “In my last years with him, there were bruises on my face.”

About her own marriage, she says, “It was like a hurricane. You know how sometimes you go outside there’s the rain and a nice breeze and everything feels so good? Then a hurricane can come along and speed everything up and everything gets [expletive] up. That’s how relationships can be.”

Gray says she hasn’t seen her ex-husband, whose name she refuses to give, since the divorce, but he did phone her one day to congratulate her on her success. “I thought that was nice,” she says softly. “I really appreciated that.”

*

Gray doesn’t stand out backstage at the Greek Theatre. There’s no swagger as she chats casually with members of her band minutes before going on stage. She’s wearing a floppy sweater and loose-fitting jeans. Her hair is covered by a cap.

But she comes alive when she does step on stage.

It’s not just the sparkling gold coat and bright boa that catch your eye, but also her commanding manner. She doesn’t move with the grace of a great performer, but she puts herself into the songs so fully that you feel absolutely connected to her musical vision.

“I’m addicted to the stage,” she says. “When I’m out there, I feel godly, like the pope or Cleopatra or whatever. It’s your own world, and you are in charge.”

She and her colorfully clad band convey the communal spirit of Sly & the Family Stone or Joe Cocker’s old Mad Dogs & Englishmen troupe.

Backstage, there’s the same sense of community.

“We are a family,” she says. “It just happened naturally. There are even a couple of romances going on. Kiilu [Beckwith], the DJ, is my boyfriend. We are in love. . . . Everybody is tied in and gifted, so I’d be crazy not to ask their ideas.”

Except for a break in September to begin work on a new album, Gray expects to keep busy touring through New Year’s. She’ll probably see even less of the rented Encino house because she plans to buy a brownstone in New York--closer to Canton, where her children live with her parents while she is traveling.

The members of her band and road crew have felt the effects of Gray’s pace. Jerome Crooks, the tour manager, says a couple of crew members have quit because of the strain that constant touring was putting on their marriages.

For Gray, however, the whole experience is a healing influence in her life.

“Music is the best side of me,” she says. “When I was doing music, I was never in trouble. It made me feel good about myself. It keeps me going.” *

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.