Melody Gardot’s soul-drenched voice sings torch songs about love and disappointment, of pain being part of life. Gardot has learnt not only to live with pain but to use it to give her a new life as a musician.

We meet in her overheated hotel suite in Los Angeles. A raucous dinner was planned, but Gardot is feeling fragile. She still walks with a stick and wears tinted glasses at all times because she can’t look at light. She likes to drink cognac and smoke cigars and talk about sex, but the accident she was in five years ago still takes its toll on her, emotionally and physically.

When she was 19 she was cycling with purpose — she thinks maybe to go to the bank. The exact errand, along with a lot of what happened in her life, has been wiped from her brain. A Cherokee Jeep went through a red light and knocked her to the ground. She remembers struggling and she remembers not being able to move, and that if pain was given marks out of 10, this pain would be 40. Then she remembers the hospital. They were trying to cut her clothes off. She remembers screaming “No!” as they got to her newly purchased Agent Provocateur bra.

The accident was so severe, with serious injuries to her head, back and pelvis, that she was bedridden for a year. Her muscles atrophied and she had to be taught how to walk again. She couldn’t remember anything, like how to brush her teeth. Words, in which she had been very fluent, a straight-A student, crumbled away.

Before the accident, she’d played the piano, and it was suggested that music therapy, which has been proven to help redefine neural pathways, would benefit her. She was bought a guitar, which she learnt to play while supine. At this point she could barely stand. But the music brought her back to herself. “Music is the thing that saved me. It’s the thing that gave me purpose. In my mind it made me walk. It gave me the dignity of being a human being who could do something, and we all need purpose. If nothing defines your character, nothing gives you the ability to wake up in the morning. I think we can easily lose the passion to exist, and then it becomes hard to wake up, hard to go to sleep. So in that sense, music has become my priority. Music is my love. Probably the greatest love of all for me. Men are just my lovers.”

A friend who was impressed by her songwriting — always simple, pure, clear, from deep inside her — created a MySpace page for her. Then came a request to play a gig at a well-known cool venue in Philadelphia, where she was living. Then WXPN, the radio station that helped to launch Norah Jones’s career, called asking for a demo, which she didn’t have but quickly got together. And that resulted in a deal with the world’s biggest record company, Universal. An insider, who asked not to be named, says her album My One and Only Thrill, is this year’s top priority, with U2’s new album.

She’s wearing leggings that are a little too baggy for her skinny limbs. Her foot is scarred from swimming into coral. She catches me looking at them. “I can’t walk too well, but I can swim like you wouldn’t believe.” Resolutely, her glass is always half-full and brimming with vintage champagne. “The accident made me a writer, musically. In fact, it was a catalyst in so many ways that I didn’t expect. In the beginning I wrote like someone who was trying to make a record. It’s like an artist’s sketchbook. And then music became something else for me, a bodily function, like a fart. You just have to let it out.

“I wrote before I could walk. At around nine months I first made an attempt to walk, but when I wasn’t in therapy I was in bed. About 13 months post-accident I was walking with a cane, but like Frankenstein.” (She means Frankenstein’s monster.) “It took four different intensive therapies to walk with fluidity in my gait, and even now if I get cold, it hurts and makes my muscles tight, so I had this little wobble thing.

“I learnt to play the guitar on my back, so it’s strange to relearn it, as I am now able to sit. I get really bad vertigo when I stand up, so I don’t want to run the risk of being known as a collapsing musician.” Did she ever get vertigo before? “No, it was all part of the damage to my nervous system. The top and bottom of my spine was damaged as well as my pelvis. This also means that your sensitivity to light and sound is affected, so I’ve had lots of therapy: vision therapy, music therapy, walking therapy.”

It is the music therapy that not only saved her life but gave her a whole new one. “When I was 16, I played in a piano bar [it started when she ran out of petrol and needed to make her petrol money home]. I’d play the Mamas and the Papas and Radiohead. But writing my own songs couldn’t have been further from my mind.”

Even though she walks with a cane, she always wears very high heels. She likes to be extreme: “I have high arches. I don’t even own sneakers.”

In a rather Buddhist-like way, she has no home and few possessions. She travels with just two suitcases: one small, one big. She found that she was permanently on tour, so she got rid of her flat in Philadelphia, and gave her furniture and cat away to friends. She says she doesn’t miss the flat. She shows me a picture of it on her MacBook. It was sparse: a piano, big windows, blond-wood floors. She misses her cat, though.

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