Ella Mai knows how to be a pop star, to such an extent that the south London-raised singer's omnipresent R&B slinker Boo'd Up made her the first British artist since 1992 to

top the US R&B chart, and has earned her two Grammy nominations this year. However, she also knows what it is like to be a fan. On tour, her merch stand offers lyric booklets, designed

so that streaming-era audiences can relive the endless hours she spent as a teenager devouring the inlays that came with her favourite CDs. After the first night of Ella's UK tour, she

met some of those fans: mostly girls, mostly quite young. One of their mums pulled Ella to one side and said: "Thanks for making the time, she's had a difficult year." Ella is

is, I begin – and even I'm surprised at how early in our interview Captain Buzzkill is making an appearance – realistically, not all these kids will ever achieve their dreams. They

won't have multiple award nominations, or top a billion streams, or have gold-selling albums, or tour with Bruno Mars. They might continue to have difficult years. "Well,"

Ella nods, "that's the tough thing. That's something I'm still figuring out, to be honest." If there is one theme that defines Ella Mai's success, it's

figuring things out as she goes along. In an era defined by the siren's call of streaming service algorithms, many artists are finding true creativity to be hard work and reward-free;

couple that with the fact that the music industry is largely built on happy accidents subsequently passed off as deliberate masterplans, and it is even more refreshing that Ella Mai makes no

effort to cast the success of Boo'd Up as remotely premeditated. The reality is that the song, with its very non-2010s nod to early-2000s R&B, had been knocking around in a pile of

demos for years. It might, Ella supposes, have been passed over by other artists first; her producer and label boss DJ Mustard shares an A&R with Rihanna. In any case, Mustard only

dusted off the song when he and Ella were putting the finishing touches to the three EP releases. "Mustard just randomly came across it," Ella remembers. "He said: 'Do

you like this?' I said: 'Yeah.'" There was no magic or drama to the song's recording, which took place late at night, because that's when Ella works best, in a

studio with just a recording engineer in attendance. "I know you want to hear an exciting story," Ella laughs. "It was just another session. I recorded it, and the EP was

done. Such a boring story." The truth, I offer, is never boring. Neither of us seems particularly convinced. In any case, Ella's third EP came out, and it went down well with her

slowly growing fanbase, built through support slots with acts such as Kehlani, but none of the EP's tracks exactly prompted spontaneous international street parties. "We were still

very hopeful," Ella says today. "[Mustard] never said to me: 'I don't know if what we're doing is right.' He's stuck by his first gut feeling about me.

Luckily, it got us somewhere." It did indeed. Ten months later, a clubber requested Boo'd Up from Bay Area DJ Big Von, who spoke to Rolling Stone and summarised the crowd response

thusly: "I saw a fat dude do a cartwheel – a solid cartwheel, he didn't even fall. Security comes over to me: 'What the hell is this?'" The song spread. Nicki Minaj

and Quavo hopped on a remix. Rihanna, far from taking umbrage at Ella, listened along to it on Instagram. By mid-2018, after more than a year, Ella's slow-burn hit had become

inescapable. At one photoshoot last year, Ella was handed a phone, and on the other end of the line was someone who'd just called to say he loved Boo'd: "He started talking,

and I thought, 'Hold on … ' I don't know who I expected it to be, but I definitely didn't expect it to be Stevie Wonder." Last Christmas, Wonder introduced Ella on

stage at a charity event where they performed Superstition together, saying: "She made me want to go home and do some things. And guess what? I did." Write a song? Defrost the

freezer? Hard to say. Either way: "Probably the greatest thing I've ever heard in my life," Ella beams today. All of which would have seemed at best unlikely to the Ella Mai

kicking around south-west London hotspots such as Mitcham, Merton and Wimbledon Chase in the early 2000s. Let's just say, tourists on future Ella Mai sightseeing tours won't be in

for the most exciting afternoon of their lives. (Ella's summary: "It's very residential and then there's … nothing.") She would play football on Saturdays, and on

Sundays she'd be in church with her grandmother, a minister in a pentecostal church. Ella's parents had split when the kids were young; Ella says that when it came to raising Ella

and older brother Miles, "mum did all the work". The names Ella and Miles give a glimpse at the intensity of their mother's passion for the jazz greats, and Ella's own

tastes broadened with the arrival of her first iPod. When Ella was in year nine, her mum got a job in the States, which took Ella to New York. She hated it there. "At 13, you're

trying to find yourself anyway," Ella says today, "but I felt so different, and I was the only one with an English accent." Then, there it is again: "I learned to not

think about it too much, and try and figure it out as I went along." Eventually, the family moved back to the UK and Ella scored a place at music college. Somewhere in her mum's

house is an old softback ("but not flimsy") Paperchase notebook containing Ella's earliest ideas. "I'll probably look back on it and go: 'Oh my God, what was I

doing?'" she laughs. "But back then, I took it everywhere I went. It was like a sacred piece of equipment." These days, she writes song ideas into her phone. By 2014, a

college friend had introduced Ella to a producer, who in turn knew a third aspiring singer. The producer suggested a girl band. "Three or four girls sounds like a headache," Ella

remembers thinking. "I was like: 'Hell, no. I'm not going to be in a girl group.'" Cut to X Factor 2014 and London three-piece Arize performing a Little Mix

empowerment ballad. There were four yeses at the first audition, but bootcamp was less kind, and that was that. It says more about The X Factor than it does about Ella that the show's

only success story of the last few years involves someone who didn't even make it to the live shows. I ask Ella what she thinks Simon Cowell meant when he told Arize: "I think

you're real." "I have no clue _what _he meant," she laughs. "Probably that he was trying to make it seem like he really cared." Ella is still in touch with one

of her Arize bandmates; reading-between-the-lines fans may be interested to note that Ella says her main learning from Arize was that "I have more patience than I thought I did".

Amid working stints in Topshop's flagship Oxford Street store ("It was like a zoo"), then at the Aveda concession in House of Fraser ("A different sort of customer – not

as polite"), Ella met with labels where everything they suggested ended up being too pop-based. "Stuff that wasn't me," is how she describes it. Anyway, Ella says, she

had always dreamed of signing with a US label. "My mum never understood why I said that, but the biggest example I use is Estelle. I loved her even when I was little, and I always

wondered why she went to America. Then I did my research, and I started to see a pattern for R&B artists in the UK: there's a ceiling. You reach a certain point and you either go

pop, or you disappear." Eventually the right kind of interest came via an Instagram message from Mustard, who was setting up his own label. Ella has no idea whether she was the only

singer Mustard approached, but between 2015 and 2016 she would fly to and from LA. There were no contracts. "I could have been totally screwed over," she accepts. "I could

have just been recording demos for him to give to someone else. He would just sit and watch." There are lessons to be learned from Ella's success: artist development is important,

patience is paramount, just one song can totally change an artist's career. Also, sometimes, the best way for a song to succeed is for it to stand out. "Boo'd Up is a very

innocent love song and we were missing that for a long time, especially in the R&B world," is Ella's reasoning. "It's clean cut. No swearing. The people kind of chose

it; you have to give the people what they want." Asked about her passions outside music, Ella's answer is "just women empowerment", which leads her to mention her

support for the #MeToo movement, then the recent R Kelly documentary, and how an initial wave of people trying to boycott the series has been supplanted by "now seeing people watch the

docuseries and come out and be like: 'You know what, we shouldn't have had to wait this many years for these women to come out and be heard.'" This makes me wonder

whether she had any qualms about working with Chris Brown, on the otherwise-quite-brilliant album track Whatchamacallit. Ella talks about separating art from artist, and how she doesn't

agree with everything Brown has done. (This interview is taking place before the round of Chris Brown headlines that popped up in late January.) She adds: "In situations where things

have happened and people have paid their dues, it's a little bit different, if you're comparing it to the R Kelly situation." We go on to talk about Ella's tattoos (one

is of a lion – sadly, not the chocolate bar); her French bulldog Thierry (she supports Arsenal; the dog's currently undergoing obedience training due to being "bad as hell");

and her favourite book, Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers, which inspired Ella's track 10,000 Hours. We agree that her label boss, real name Dijon McFarlane, gets too little credit

for calling himself Mustard. In Ella's immediate future are the Brits (she is nominated for the British breakthrough award) and the Grammys, where Boo'd Up is nominated for song of

the year and R&B song of the year. "I don't know the last time an R&B artist was recognised at the Brits," Ella says warily, "but we'll see. Hopefully the

success of Boo'd Up has shown the British industry that R&B is still alive and that there's loads of room for it, but these things take time." She is more optimistic about

success at the Grammys, or at least she's saying she is. "I think I'll win both," she decides. "You've got to speak it into existence, right?" As our time

runs out I say it will be interesting to see how Ella's influence will spread through music in the coming year. "Even you saying that is the weirdest thing to hear," she

gasps. "It's like, my _influence_! It's crazy." It's exciting for R&B music, she adds. "It's important and it was needed, and I'm glad I was part

of it." As for whether approval from the Rihannas and the Stevies leaves Ella now feeling as if she is part of the pop establishment she once only knew as an outsider, she pauses for a

moment. "It's weird. It's surreal to think that these are now my peers. Technically, to everyone on the outside, I'm one of them. To me, I'm just Ella." _Ella

Mai's self-titled album is out now on 10 Summers/Interscope_