Waiting for her soundcheck at the Newport Music Hall, Columbus, Ohio, Jem is weary.
You can tell this not by the tone of her voice or by reading between the lines, but by the way she doesn’t bother with that outdated quality known as tact.
“I’ve made an album and I love it. But it took two months to record and I’ve been talking about it for two years,” she tells me. Er, we’ll not disturb you then, shall we?
Thankfully, she isn’t playing the diva for Hot Press. What you are hearing is the creative frustration of a person inspired enough to invent a whole new alt-pop sound with her debut album, Finally Woken.
"I love music and I’m a songwriter first and foremost,” Jem states, "but I haven’t been able to write a song in a year and a half. When I was trying to get signed, I’d be writing two a week.”
It seems that a heavy schedule is the price the diminutive songstress has to pay for her success in the States, where she’s signed to Dave Matthews’ label, Ato Reocrds, which also represents fellow Welshman David Gray.
With their support she’s notched up sales of a quarter of a million, appeared as a guest on The O.C. and made ‘Wish I’ a household hit. On this side of the pond you may know it as the Celebrity Love Island theme.
“Ultimately, I can’t complain because it’s been wonderful,” she adds.
But?
“But it’s not even time spent touring. Three-quarters of this year has been promotional stuff like television. A quarter of the time has been touring. There’s no time for songwriting at all. Take photo-shoots. To a lot of people, it might seem really exciting. But I don’t like to spend five hours there when I could be in the studio.”
Accordingly, she’s cleared time early next year to record the follow-up (“and even if I miss out on cool things, that’s just fine”).
That’s not before heading back to Dublin in December. She enjoys an avid following in Ireland, after summer gigs in the capital and Belfast.
“They were amazing. You don’t get that kind of reaction anywhere. I hope the Irish crowds will be the same this time."
Although she had a rare day off in Belfast, one couldn’t exactly say that she took in its many cultural highlights.
“I walked into town and went to Tesco’s and Boots,” she laughs. “The thing with being on tour is that everything’s so planned out. From the moment you wake up, it’s like: ‘a car’s coming for you at this time, five minutes later you’ll get a phone call from this person…’ It’s all timed. So to be able to just walk around a Tesco’s looking at things is so exciting.”
Not, we’re thinking, the same kind of exciting she intends for her Dublin gig at the Ambassador, December 3.