An ingenue no longer

ON a recent Tuesday afternoon, Katharine McPhee was sashaying through a Valley coffee shop in a red crystal-covered mini-dress. The leggy singer with the cascade of brown hair knocked her hips from side to side theatrically. “I feel like I’m doing what Beyonce does,” she giggled, to a small but appreciative audience that includes her boyfriend, her publicist, a representative from Swarovski (which made the dress) and the barrista and kitchen crew.

“This dress barely covers my butt,” she said, swinging it vigorously. “Baby, if I’m going to be wearing this -- I’m going to have to get to the gym,” she said as she nodded to boyfriend Nick Cokas.

McPhee is at the exact vertiginous moment of her career when she can still change in the bathrooms of coffee shops and not create a major commotion. She’s now famous as a reality star -- the winsome runner-up from last season’s “American Idol” -- but she’s not yet a genuine rock star in her own right, and her new album, “Katharine McPhee” (released today, will largely determine whether McPhee ascends into the winner’s circle of Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood or joins the crew of “Idol” has-beens such as Justin Guarini.

She arrived at this Ventura Boulevard coffee shop -- a local haunt she’s been frequenting ever since high school -- after a long day of publicity. Her farm-fresh features had been meticulously lacquered for photo shoots and interviews, and the famed mane now included hair extensions. Decked out in a slouchy brown sweater and jeans, she toted a white paper Williams-Sonoma shopping bag filled with shirts and cowboy boots that enabled her to change her look between various interviews.

So often on “Idol,” McPhee seemed a beautiful girl with a beautiful voice in search of an identity. The “Idols” who win tend to have personas with hooks -- Clarkson the sassy belter, Fantasia the tough single mama with the baby-doll voice. McPhee’s most memorable performance was a rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz” -- the song was sweet yearning and nothing but. It would turn out to be the second-best selling single of 2006.

Over a sandwich that she devoured, she said, “I think the hardest thing about that show is finding who you are in front of everybody else in the whole world.” Especially for her because, “and I don’t mean this egotistically. I am a little bit versatile. I can sound like the singer who sings jazz. I could do my little R&B;, so it made it difficult for people to pinpoint me.”

In person, the 22-year-old McPhee appears more distinctive, and scrappy -- she did, after all, do some starving-actress years, living at home with her parents in the Valley, failing on auditions and making money by singing in local musical-theater productions. She’s anchored by an unexpectedly husky speaking voice and tends to be blunt. It’s nice to see that her persona hasn’t yet been shined to a high-impenetrable gloss.

She thinks her best performance on “Idol” came at the beginning of the season, “when I was the most calm and still kind of in reality. I wasn’t absorbed in this bubble.”

She got rattled by nerves in the contest, especially as it went on. “When I got into the top five is when I really started to lose it. Just getting like emotional during rehearsals. Just doubting yourself a lot. Having nerves you can’t really control. I did the best that I could, but it was the best I could do in that moment. I don’t think it was necessarily my best.”

The new album appears to be a snapshot of McPhee at this point in time -- recorded in the few months since the “Idol” tour ended last summer. Her image and sound have definitely gone a little more sultry. Forget the innocent ingenue. The cover features a ripe McPhee in a loose but clingy gold-and-black striped sweater dress, her legs provocatively splayed, encased in foreboding thigh-high black leather boots, and her thatch of hair doing its requisite tumbling.

The songs alternate between power ballads and up-tempo girl-power tunes. She and her record company -- part of the Sony/BMG empire, like all the Idols -- had intended to just sit back and see what songs were sent to them by songwriters, but McPhee wasn’t happy. “It was stuff that I wasn’t identifying with,” so the record company packed her off to Virginia Beach, Va., for 10 days to work with Nate “Danja” Hills, the record producer who co-produced (with Timbaland) Nelly Furtado’s hit single “Promiscuous” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack.”

They produced nine songs in 10 days, including three to which McPhee contributed lyrics: “Neglected,” about leaving a bad relationship (“I don’t like this feeling whenever I’m around you. I want to be respected, but I’m just neglected”), and a kicky ode to shoes, “Open Shoes.” “What’s the other song I co-wrote on? Why can’t I remember it?” she says. It turns out to be “Not Ur Girl,” another song about dumping a bad guy.

It’s still hard to gauge what McPhee actually likes musically -- other than the usual array of top-of-the-chart hits -- Timberlake, Fergie, Beyonce. In the privacy of her own shower, she does like to let it rip. “I like to sing really big, belting, powerful songs in the shower because it echoes. Most recently it probably would be Beyonce’s song called ‘Listen’ from ‘Dreamgirls.’ It’s a big song that makes you feel good about yourself.”

The daughter of a vocal coach and a TV producer, McPhee has been performing since she was 7, when she sang “Jingle Bell Rock” at her mom’s church. “I was really proud to have my second-grade teacher come see me sing. Because I knew that she would be impressed.” She grew up first in a marginal section of Van Nuys, before moving to the cozy suburbia of Sherman Oaks and going to Notre Dame High.

Still, as anyone from L.A. knows, the Valley is a world completely removed from the Sodom and Gomorrah of L.A. proper. McPhee almost never went over the hill until she moved into the suite of apartments designated for the Idols, near the CBS studios where the show is taped.

The finalists, she said, are kept under close watch, with a security guard constantly tailing them when they do real-world activities, like shop for the upcoming show’s outfit. “If you want to go search for the new Idol, go look at the Beverly Center on Thursday mornings, and I bet you’ll see Idol sightings.”

McPhee didn’t much like the constant surveillance, and doesn’t know if it was really needed. “I think they were also just trying to make sure that you don’t find another manager,” she cracked. “They are invested. They don’t want you to leave.”

Asked whether she ever felt hometown support, McPhee smirked and laughed. “No. I’m not going to lie. I definitely didn’t. It’s typical. They were all rooting for somebody else. L.A. can’t even keep a football team.” Indeed, it was almost painful to watch the episode when the finalists returned for a celebratory hometown visit and to see her competitor Taylor Hicks embraced with statewide Alabama love and thousands of fans, while McPhee had to make do with a cadre from her high school. “It’s pretty pathetic. I can’t complain, though. Other small towns were behind me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made it as far as I did.”

It’s clear as she talks that McPhee isn’t the simple ingenue she so often appeared to be on “Idol” -- and she went further to crush that image when the contest was over, as she revealed to People magazine that she’d been a bulimic for five years. Before the Hollywood round of the “Idol” audition began, she enrolled at a treatment center and spent three months undergoing group and individual therapy, six days a week.

McPhee explained that she decided to go public because she felt the responsibility of all these little girls looking up to her. When a People reporter asked how she’d lost weight, she decided impulsively to come clean. “I am so sick of like having to be just like every other Hollywood story.” She mimicked the usual star publicity drill. “ ‘I went on this diet and I cut out these foods and....’ I was, like, you know what? I want to be real about it so I can help other people. I was really unhealthy and I had gotten healthy, and that’s why I changed. So it was really for me so I could feel free to be honest about everything.”

Indeed, while McPhee is fully ready to cop to the fact that she’s still in development -- both as a person and an artist -- she does seem to have a mantra that’s guiding her through the thicket of growing up in a world heady with other people’s expectations. She frames it as advice to the new crop of “Idol” wannabes now dominating the TV season. “Don’t trust anybody, because the producers have their agenda. I personally would just stick to your own guns, and do what you think is right in your gut.”

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com