Music: Duffy: Princess of Wales

Duffy's laughter instantly filled the phone.

"I just had the weirdest moment ever," blurted Duffy, the newly minted British pop star, who had been listening to recorded music as her rep connected the call. "I'm singing to myself on the phone."

How did she sound?

"I thought it suffered a bit on the bottom end," she said. "But overall, I was quite pleased."

The much ballyhooed 24-year-old newcomer, who will make her Minneapolis debut next Thursday, is playful, innocent and disarmingly honest. Those qualities have been useful in combating detractors who suggest that Duffy is to soul music what Norah Jones is to jazz -- pleasing to the Starbucks crowd, but a shadow of the real thing -- and bemoan her rise to No. 1 in England with the retro soul smash "Mercy" and the album "Rockferry."

"I'm not too precious about things, you know," she said from Barcelona, Spain, where she was wrapping up a European tour. "I can't be something that I'm not. You don't have to love my record, that's fine. I know I'm going to grow and I'm going to explore many things. We all change."

Although she played a few U.S. shows in the spring, she considers this her first proper stateside tour. In many cities, she'll sing at festivals with huge crowds, but she'll open the tour at Minneapolis' legendary First Avenue, which holds perhaps 1,500.

Aimee Ann Duffy comes from Nefyn, a fishing village (population 2,500) on Wales' western coast, where she learned about music from the radio and her father's tape of the 1960s TV show "Ready, Steady, Go" featuring the Beatles and Rolling Stones. At 19, she finished second on "WawFfactor," a Welsh version of England's "Pop Idol," and was introduced to Jeannette Lee, co-owner of the indie label Rough Trade. Lee exposed Duffy to all kinds of music and paired her with producer Bernard Butler, former bassist for 1990s Brit poppers Suede.

The rookie was clever enough to come up with "Mercy" and its "yeah, yeah, yeah" refrain (perhaps an answer to Winehouse's "no no no" in "Rehab").

"I was so frustrated in this situation with a boy and I wanted so much to do something but I couldn't, so I wrote a song about it," said Duffy of the hit, in which she begs her man to remove the spell he has over her. "It was like a big tantrum. I was screaming. It was a release from the horrible control that somebody had over me, this kind of power and temptation."

Her album has drawn comparisons not just to Winehouse but to Dusty Springfield, another blonde Brit with a flair for understated soul. But Duffy would rather talk about someone closer to home -- Welsh icon Sir Tom Jones.

"What does he mean to me? He means sex," she said. "It was very liberating. That was a Welshman doing that in the days when people were quite well-behaved, for lack of a better word. He was kind of cool, you know, he was kind of a bit punk. The guy is still going. He's still probably got the sex drive of a 21-year-old. He's a great bloke.