Sweet emotion

Songstress Dido opens up on 'Safe Trip Home'

''I don't want to get histrionic when I'm singing,'' says Dido. ''For me, that's just not interesting.''

LOS ANGELES - Talking about her new album at a Hollywood rehearsal studio recently, Dido Armstrong used one word more than any other - 14 times, in fact, over the course of an hour. The word was "emotion."

This was a bit surprising, since Dido is pretty much the living picture of musical reserve.

"I pull emotion into these songs," said the English singer-songwriter, whose third studio album, "Safe Trip Home," was released last month in the United States. "Sometimes it's my emotions, sometimes it's something I've picked up. But then it becomes yours when you take it on."

Dido is contemporary pop's most resolute plain Jane, even more firmly undramatic than her American counterpart, Norah Jones. Her two multiplatinum albums and her sampled vocal on Eminem's 2000 hit, "Stan," made her a single-named pop star, but she truly wouldn't cause a stir at the grocery store. She's sensible-ponytail pretty, embodying that pre-feminist term for self-possession, "demureness."

Another word Dido often uses is "insular" - that one describes not her music but herself.

"I will just say things how they are," she said of her songs, which are considered by admiring fellow songwriters to be models of unfussy introspection. "I always want to bring emotion across in a straightforward way. I don't want to get histrionic when I'm singing. For me that's just not interesting; it goes too far down one road."

The delicate strength of Dido's music has made her an unexpected critical favorite. She's the kind of artist who's often dismissed by tastemakers as too bland, yet many find themselves drawn into her songs despite themselves.

"It has its own kind of integrity," wrote Barry Walters in Rolling Stone, reviewing 2003's "Life for Rent." Similar, somewhat startled praise is now filtering in for "Safe Trip Home."

"She's much maligned as hitting that place on the first album where every 25- to 35-year-old woman owned her record," said Nic Harcourt, the outgoing music director of local station KCRW. "Then it sort of becomes, 'Oh my God, she's everywhere.' But if you take a listen to the songs, she's just a really good songwriter. At the end of the day, that's what comes through."

Dido is a careful miniaturist in a field in which bold strokes are more rewarded, especially from women. Emerging from England's down-tempo electronic music scene in collaboration with her brother, Rollo Armstrong of the band Faithless, her style stood out in contrast to more picturesque divas like Portishead's Beth Gibbons or Tricky's partner, Martina Topley-Bird. But she also was upholding the legacy of reserved feminine voices that extends through European pop from Francoise Hardy to early Marianne Faithfull to Linda Thompson to Sade, Tracey Thorn, and Beth Orton.

"She's one of the most naturally gifted singers I've witnessed," Jon Brion, who produced much of "Safe Trip Home," said in a phone interview. "Her sense of time, her sense of musicality is huge. Partly because she's had success, and partly because the pure electronic quality of her earlier records, and the subtlety of this kind of singing, I don't think people realize how deeply musical and flowing it is - and how it influences the musicians around her."

Enlisting Brion on "Safe Trip Home" brought the kind of drama Dido welcomes. As a producer, the Los Angeles-based Brion is best known for spinning gold from unruly souls such as Kanye West, Rufus Wainwright, and Fiona Apple. He and Dido first connected as writing partners, but a studio collaboration soon evolved.

"I was actually a fan of her writing," Brion said. "With a lot of people who are making things, you feel like it's running through a borrowed filter. It's their idea of what it means to be an artist. Whereas, there's a point in which you realize somebody's intelligent and self-aware enough to take the time to run things through their filter. That's the attraction for me."

Brion encouraged Dido to try new things, starting with an unexpected basic: playing the drums. Sitting behind the kit, as well as working with the top-notch drummers Brion recruited, including Mick Fleetwood, Jim Keltner, Questlove, and Matt Chamberlain, prompted Dido to delve deeper into the rhythmic core of her sound.

"I come from a dance-music background, and I went through all the phases when I was young of loving dub and reggae, and then into hip-hop," she said. "Learning to play the drums as well really opened up my brain. I'll be writing a song on the guitar, and maybe a little stuck on that, and I'll move to the piano, and now it's this really liberating thing that I can go to the drums. Because to me a song is just about the flow of it, it just has to flow and me to never notice in a way, it has to feel whole and real."

After her sessions with Brion, Dido returned to London, thinking that "Safe Trip Home" was done. But she couldn't stop writing.

"I went home, and I had all my instruments around, and I now knew how to record and work all the computer programs and everything, and how to engineer it, and ended up basically doing a whole album's worth of stuff on my own at home, from what I'd learned," she recalled.

At first she thought she'd keep these new efforts to herself, but soon she shared them with her brother. He encouraged her to complete the songs, and several appear on the new collection.

Her expanded sense of self also helped Dido take new thematic risks. At the album's core is a confrontation with stasis and mortality, spurred by the death of Dido's father from lupus in 2006. Songs such as the album's centerpiece, "Grafton Street," capture the complexity of a family member's lingering departure. Others consider how even the happiest circumstances - like settling down in a relationship ("Look No Further") or having a child ("Us 2 Little Gods") - contain their own small deaths, as other possibilities are put aside.

" 'Look No Further' is a prime example of something where I want to express something really simple and pure and beautiful, but I also can't help myself having a little bit of doubt," Dido said. "And a song about something absolutely devastating can be uplifting and hopeful as well. 'Grafton Street' is an example of that. It's definitely a sad song, but there's something in there for me which is talking in such a loving way about something devastating because that's how I felt. There's always a bit of both for me, and that's what I find exciting about the world."