Geffen Records

You can certainly taste some sugar and spice – not to mention a bracing shot of whiskey-tinged wit – in the music of Kate Nash. But when it comes time to answer the question of what the 20-year-old singer-songwriter is made of, one need only look at the title of her debut album – Made of Bricks.

“People thought that title would make me sound hard, but I really fought for it,” recalls Nash, whose straight-forward tales and warm, winning voice catapulted Made of Bricks to the number-one spot on Britain’s album chart in its first week of release. “Bricks are strong, just like good relationships are strong, and that’s what bricks signify to me. I’m a homey kind of girl and I like hanging out on a Sunday and eating mashed potatoes and bricks just say home and family – the things that I can’t live without.”

References to those items pepper Made of Bricks, but Nash – who grew up just outside London in the working-class suburb of Harrow – is in no danger of slipping into Hallmark territory. She’s capable – on the impossibly infectious single “Foundations” – of detailing the crumbling of a relationship in perfect detail, and self-aware enough to turn the mirror on herself on “Mouthwash,” a lilting look at a girl with “a thousand opinions and not the time to explain.”

Even when those opinions aren’t exactly the nicest – on the finger-popping “Dickhead,” she spends a good deal of time advising a friend not to be one – Nash manages to elicit a smile from the listener. Credit a good bit of that charm to the singer-songwriter’s guileless willingness to get in touch with her inner child – a sassy creature who comes to the fore most clearly on the Tim Burton-inspired “Mariella,” on which she channels that innocent spirit with unfettered joy.

Nash, who has been writing songs since she was 13 years old, recalling “I used to tape everything on one of those ancient tape players where you had to push play and record at the same time,” but initially thought she’d go into theater. After a spell at London’s School for Performing Arts & Technology (alma mater of Amy Winehouse and members of the Kooks) where she starred in several plays and wrote others, she had the good fortune to fall down a flight of stairs and break her foot – an injury her parents tried to soothe by offering up a guitar as company.

“People have said that I only started doing music after my accident, but that’s not true,” Nash says. “I did have more time to write and develop my own style. When I could listen back to the songs I was writing and not cringe, I started playing them for my sisters, and it sort of went from there.”

And it “sort of” picked up very quickly for Nash, whose earliest recordings garnered a huge MySpace following, not to mention raves from kindred spirits like Lily Allen. She made her recorded debut less than a year ago, with the cheeky electro-folk bopper “Caroline’s a Victim,” which sold out its initial pressing of a thousand copies almost overnight, a testament to the song’s catchiness and Nash’s no-B.S. attitude.

Nash scored a deal with Fiction Records less than two months after that first single hit stores. Quickly, she began combing through her notebooks to cull the songs that would come to make up Made of Bricks, paying close attention to “the ones that were the most embarrassing to play, because those ended up being the ones that people liked the most.” In January 2008 Geffen Records will release Made of Bricks stateside.

More often than not, Nash holds down the disc’s fort on her own, alternating between acoustic guitar and vintage synthesizer (the latter being the base for the lighthearted opener, “Play”). Now and again, however, producer Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Babyshambles) drops her into a bit of a sonic maelstrom, and she responds with verve, flaunting an impish charisma on songs like the “Pumpkin Soup.”

No matter what the setting, however, Nash’s personality comes to the fore, making Made of Bricks one of the most unique debuts of the season – prompting the New York Times to dub it “lovable,” and Britain’s Gigwise to conclude “It’s a grower in every sense and one that leaves you guessing, daydreaming and wanting more.” Nash herself shrugs off the hype and assesses her position with typical frankness.

“When ‘Foundations’ got to number-two on the charts in Britain, I suddenly found myself on bills with all of these pop stars like Girls Aloud and I was like, ‘what am I doing here?,’” she says with a laugh. “I was surrounded by shiny pop kids with neat hair and handlers and I’m the geeky girl with rips in her tights and scraggly hair. But then I realized I was there because people liked my songs – people are getting fed up with things they can’t relate to and people who seem out of reach. I’ll never be out of reach.”

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