Ask avant-pop singer Maisy Kay to single-out her music idol, and she’ll immediately name-check Freddie Mercury, that glam-rock icon with an unabashed love of cabaret. But ask her whom she’s dreamed of sounding like, and she’ll just as promptly reference softer, torch-ballad legends Whitney Houston and Celine Dion. That dexterity in singing and songwriting has served her well. In less than five years, Maisy Kay has gone from a kid harboring starry dreams in Claverley (a hamlet in the English countryside) to a buzzy talent poised to break out in Los Angeles. As fate would have it, she has been working on the bulk of her debut album with Stuart Brawley, the producer/engineer behind Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. “At first, I didn’t know where I wanted to go with my voice or style. Stuart really helped bring out the beltier side of me,” she says. A self-taught pianist, Maisy wrote her first song—well, technically a whole play—at age 10. “It was about a dragon. And a girl coming on a pirate ship to this new island,” she recalls, laughing. The play was performed by Maisy and her schoolmates to an audience of proud parents. “I couldn’t really imagine singing something that I hadn’t written,” she explains. To this day, Maisy eschews the pop world’s tendency to recruit an arsenal of songwriters and only performs her own compositions. Many of them are penned daily around 3 a.m., her overactive mind waking her from slumber, willing her to write. “I normally do lyrics first,” she says. “And ‘Volcano’ is one of the most emotional pieces I’ve ever written.” The love-tortured track makes spectacular use of her vocal range, a bittersweet triumph that proved so emotional she actually cried while working on with Brawley. Another cut, “Blood Filled Tears,” explores even darker places—in this case, a friend’s suicide—through a powerfully lilting lament.