Alison Sudol confesses: “I’m not very rock’n’roll.” The 23-year-old, California-based singer-songwriter, who performs under the Shakespearian pseudonym A Fine Frenzy, continues: “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I don’t party after a gig. I prefer to read.” Not that she’s a typical LA girl: pale of skin, russet of hair and bee-stung of lip, she’s about as far removed from the blonde, tanned surfer-girl stereotype as you could get. “I swear a lot!” she adds.

A Fine Frenzy is already starting to attract attention for Sudol’s subtle storytelling songs, which, inspired by her passion for the English classics, bring a literate flourish to those staples of love and loss. She is also making waves as an artist with a foot in a number of creative camps – music, acting, art, literature and fashion. “Primarily, I’m a songwriter,” she stresses. “Telling stories in music – that’s it for me. But that requires being a fully fledged person: you can’t write about things if you don’t experience them.”

Recent experiences include making a splash at New York fashion week, where she found time between her own live shows and a performance on Letterman for a whirlwind fashion tour. In just 24 hours she had fittings with Anna Sui and Prada, a trip to the Jill Stuart show and a Betsey Johnson party – all of it recorded in her own Teen Vogue blog, Alison in Fashionland.

But she doesn’t expect to strut her stuff on the runway, despite unconventional beauty and a distinctive personal style. After referring to “Polish milkmaid arms” and a “vertically challenged” stature, she says: “I’m never going to do catwalks, I’m 5ft 6in and not real thin; I like bread, I like cheese, I like sweets – and living without those things would be like not living at all for me.”

Sudol has also turned her hand to acting. She made her television debut in CSI: New York late last year, and is now looking for “a small role in an indie film that’s really creative and interesting”. Until that comes along, she is writing a first novel, a children’s fantasy influenced by Lewis Carroll and CS Lewis, set in a land where animals can talk. Completing her renaissance woman credentials, she even designed her own website. “I don’t like to not be creative,” she admits. ”If that’s missing from my life, I’m a horrendous person to be around.”

For Sudol, such multitasking is the essence of being a21st-century creative figure. “Fashion is another way of expressing myself,” she says. “I enjoyed fashion week, but I was more observing than participating. It’s a completely different world.” An only child, Sudol spent her first five years in Seattle before moving to LA with her parents, both actors turned drama teachers. Her roots incorporate Scottish, Irish, Polish and “a bit” of German. “I’m a mix of anything that doesn’t tan,” she laughs. It must make her an oddity in LA, where she loves to “go out in nature” and walk with her pomeranian dog, Bertie – Engelbert Humperdinck, to give him his full name.

A “total dork” at private school (funny how many beauties say that), she buried herself in books, particularly Dickens, Hardy and Jane Austen. “I just finished Sense and Sensibility last night,” she beams when we meet in Brussels, where she is touring. “I’ve been spreading my Jane out – I love her so much, I don’t want to finish all her books.”

It turns out that Sudol is an all-round anglophile: she loves our “cute place names . . . like Wibbly Wobbly and Chis-Wick Hollow” (where do they get these ideas?), and has a passion for taking afternoon tea, no doubt inspired by all those books about English upper-class families in bygone eras. “I love manners,” she adds. “Not necessarily formalities, but just a certain level of decorum that is present especially in Victorian literature. I wish we still had that sense of politeness and decency among people.”

Sudol first tried her hand at acting when a teenager, but says she was “terrible” and froze at auditions. So she turned her creative urges towards music, singing in a rock band before learning piano at 19 and going solo under the stage name A Fine Frenzy, taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Her voice, at once vulnerable and strong, complements self-penned lyrics that articulate heartbreak, most notably on the haunting hit-in-waiting Almost Lover, which hints at a maturity beyond her years. Meanwhile, her musical influences range from the mainstream (Keane, Coldplay, Aqualung) to the avant-garde (Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Brian Eno) by way of the subtle textures of Icelandic music (Björk, Sigur Ros). This may explain why so many of her songs, initially easy on the ear, on longer and deeper listening reveal understated subtleties through atmospheric adornments of pedal steel and keyboard effects.

Her fans, who would be as hard to pigeonhole as she is, clearly feel a devotion bordering on the fanatical. In Brussels, despite jet lag, Sudol spent more than an hour chatting to a wildly disparate collection of admirers, male and female, young and old; signing autographs, smiling constantly, posing for pictures and graciously accepting gifts. Later, as she heads back to her hotel with a gift box of chocolates, she confides she has already acquired a large and growing collection of gnomes through fans’ generosity.

As Sudol prepares to turn in for the night, I take a look at the silver ring she wears on her right hand – the only jewellery visible apart from two tiny earrings. The ring bears an inscription that might serve as an inspiration to this quirky young singer, should she tire of the relentless process of selling herself to the public. It’s a Chinese proverb, which reads: “The journey is the reward.”

“I tried my whole early life not to be quirky,” she adds. “I really tried hard and I just failed. And in the end, I just thought, f*** it.” Then she found that she was not alone. “One day, I met Tom Jones at a Grammy party and I asked him if he ever got nervous, and he said, ‘Of course I do, but whenever I get nervous, I just say ‘F*** it’.”

Sudol, her green eyes shining, looks up, beaming brightly, and says: “So that’s become my motto!”

One Cell in the Sea is out in June; A Fine Frenzy plays Southampton, Oxford, Brighton and London from today; visit www.afinefrenzy.com

Explore Music

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette