It is impossible not to notice when Macy Gray enters a room. Even with her head down and her face partly obscured by a mass of wild curls, everything about the 1,83m singer is larger than life to the point of comedy.She has long, long legs, oversized hands, an enormous smile and, more strangely, the sort of thick, spiky false eyelashes that are usually found only on comedy drag queens.Moreover, she looks thoroughly uncomfortable in the swanky surroundings of London’s Nobu restaurant. In tracksuit bottoms, a T-shirt and bright pink baseball boots, she claims not to be hungry, then relents and orders miso soup, rice and iced water, which she barely touches. At first, it is hard to work out whether she is painfully shy or just plain rude as she refuses to make eye contact, twists away from the table while mumbling answers. But, she says in her tiny, peculiar voice, she is somewhat distracted tonight.”As we speak, I have a feeling that my boyfriend’s fucking someone else. I really do. I was coming downstairs and I realised. You know how people always reveal themselves? I was just talking to him on the phone and he said something really weird and I was like, what? That’s why I’m kind of preoccupied. Anyway. Whatever.”That off her chest, Gray visibly relaxes. The 33-year-old has been in Britain for 24 hours to plug her third album, The Trouble with Being Myself, and is trying not to let the promotional treadmill get her down. ”I’m really excited about this album,” she says. ”I want everyone to hear it. Everything else — the press and stuff — is OK if you’re in the right mood. With the press, it’s a bit like when you’re going out with someone but you don’t trust them. You don’t know what they’re going to say, what they’re doing behind your back, but you keep dating them anyway.”Four years after selling seven million copies of her award-winning debut album, On How Life Is, Gray remains one of the most fascinating and bizarre pop stars. She has three children, a history of depression, a broken, violent marriage and two short spells in jail (one for unpaid traffic fines, the other for drunk driving).She is not even sure she can sing. ”I like my vocals on this album,” she says. ”They came out really well. It’s crazy, but it’s taken me until now to think that. I knew I could make an album before and I know I’ve got style, too. But I don’t know if I sing good, you know? Like Whitney Houston or Chaka Khan can hit every note. I can’t really do that — but I can do something they can’t do.”Born Natalie McIntyre in Canton, Ohio, she adored Prince and Diana Ross from an early age but had little interest in playing music herself. ”I started taking piano lessons when I was seven and hated it. My dad would have to beat me every day to make me practise.”Awkward but intelligent, Gray attended, and was eventually asked to leave, a predominantly white boarding school. She never felt she belonged anywhere until she moved to Los Angeles to attend film school at 17. ”I went because it was college. College is fun. You’re 17, you’re away from home, you can do whatever you want. All I had to do was go to film school, so I went, but it wasn’t like it was anything I really got into seriously.”Instead, having befriended local musicians, she wrote songs. ”My boyfriend was a guitar player, so I started writing songs just to have an excuse to hang around with him.” The resulting demo tape was passed around and, after years of writing lyrics for other musicians and performing jazz in LA bars, Gray (a name she borrowed from a friend of her father) recorded her first album, A Thing of Beauty. The heavy-rock record was never released so Gray stopped singing, got married (and divorced) and returned to Ohio. Three years later the album ended up in the hands of Jeff Blue, a music publisher who had just signed Limp Bizkit.He couldn’t believe the smoky, soulful voice, and tracked Gray down. With her two daughters, Aanisah and Happy, and son Tahmel, she returned to LA to begin recording On How Life Is.Enthralled by her fairytale success story and bewildered by her fierce individuality, the world soon decided Gray was more than a little barmy. She is, she says, tired of the label, though hardly goes out of her way to disprove it. ”I read this quote once. Somebody was asking somebody else if he thought he was crazy. So he said a crazy person would never answer that question, so the fact that I’ve answered it a couple of times must mean I’m not crazy. Right?”Asked to what extent she cares what people think of her, Gray frowns. ”I used to think about it, but I realised that your thoughts are the only thing God gave you that are yours. Nobody ever really knows what anyone else is thinking unless you tell them. If you want to keep your thoughts secret, you can. If you want to lie about them, you can. So I don’t worry about what people are thinking about. That’s their business.”If anything, Gray astutely realises she now has the perfect excuse to act just as she chooses, however shocking or childish. She is, after all, only giving people what they want. She has been known to run naked around hotels and has said that she would make a very good thief. ”Yes. A lot of people in my family are kind of criminally minded and they taught me a lot of stuff.” What was the last thing you stole? ”Sunglasses. They’re really good. Jewellery’s easy, especially when they take stuff out to show you then help somebody else. You know what else is good? The stores in airports. But I haven’t done anything for a while.”The widespread belief that Gray is mad or drug-addled seems to derive more from her extreme emotional ups and downs, lived out in the public eye, than anything else. ”That makes it magnified, but I know I’m moody.”Her contradictory moods were the backbone and inspiration for her new album, The Trouble with Being Myself, the follow-up to her second chart-topping album, The Id. With a distinct Motown flavour, the album feels contented, even celebratory, yet it tells of unrequited love and dissatisfaction — and the recording sessions were blighted by tragedy.”My father had cancer and died,” Gray says. ”At the same time, the [Afghan] war started and I was working with Dallas Austin [famed TLC producer] when Left-Eye [TLC member Lisa Lopes] died, so that was tragic for him. Plus everyone was arguing every day about everything. It was actually a really hard record. I guess the one chance to have a good time is through your art, because when I’m upbeat and happy, I don’t want to go work. I want to go do something else.”These days, Gray is ”definitely more happy than not”. She talks animatedly of her home in LA, with its basketball court and swimming pool, as if she still can’t believe it all belongs to her. She is, she says, at her happiest there, with her children, just ”hanging out and having fun”.For now, although she misses her children, she is eager to let the world hear what she has been up to, if only so she can stop talking about it and get on with doing the one thing that allows her to feel truly comfortable.”I’m going to make records for the rest of my life,” she says. ”Life is short, so I want to spend the rest of it having a good time. I want to keep a smile on my face. For me, music is still the most powerful thing in the whole world.” — Â