The drive from Cardiff to Nefyn,

a remote fishing village on north Wales’

Llyn Peninsula, is only about 160 miles, but

it takes me nearly seven hours. Squinting through

nonstop rain, muttering at itinerant sheep, and stifling

long-ingrained right-side-of-the-road steering impulses, I fret

over ominous-sounding traffic signs I can’t read (ARWYDDION RHAN AMSER?)

and take a few desperate gulps of instant petrol-station coffee. I’m chugging north to Duffy’s hometown on the foreboding shores of Caernarfon Bay. I am going to the coast to get unstuck in time.

B4417, the primary road leading into town, is a single narrow lane, and when an oncoming car approaches, I’m forced to pull my rented Fiat off into a pasture. Once a bustling vacation destination for British golfers and families, Nefyn now has the disembodied feel of a boomtown gone bust. The population hovers around 2,500, and—save for a couple of pubs and the Nefyn & District Golf Club—recreation options are few. Although Nefyn is physically stunning—all pristine beaches, hand-built rock walls, and crumbling seaside cottages—it also feels self-contained, unchanging, and artless. It’s not hard to see how someone reared here could end up singing songs from another era, from another place.

AGIRL FROM WALES—THAT’S ALL I AM,” DUFFY SAYS, smiling. We are standing backstage at the Great Hall, a dim, boxy concert space in Cardiff University’s student union, where she’s kicking off a brief, sold-out spring tour. She paws through the amenities (a heap of chips, bottled water, a few packages of lunch meat, some Kit Kats arranged on a white paper plate) and prepares a tiny, plastic cup of tea.

“I make the best tea, I promise,” she beams. While it steeps, we drag a pair of battered folding chairs onto a concrete balcony. She lights a cigarette. We’re still blowing on our cups when a droopy-eyed ambulance driver pulls over and begins fiddling with the sign bolted to the top of his vehicle. He’s half-humming “Mercy,” the throbbing hit single from Rockferry, Duffy’s debut collection of Motown-inspired soul tracks with unshakable classic hooks. He tugs at the warped bits of plastic holding the EMERGENCY placard in place, wholly unaware that he’s standing less than ten feet from the song’s creator, a rising, if divisive, talent whose first release not only debuted at No. 1 in the U.K., but also outsold the rest of the Top 10 combined. “What’s that you’re whistling?” she trills playfully. “Just something I heard on the radio,” he barks back, unaware. “Ah,” she says, grinning.

Aimee Duffy is about to turn 24, but she seems, in some ways, ageless: She’s giddy and warm, gracious and clever, a beguiling mix of kid sister and knowing grandparent, the type of girl who will snicker about the skirts at Topshop while insisting you accept a proper cup of tea. In May, Rockferry debuted at No. 4 in the U.S., sweeping the charts just as Amy Winehouse’s similarly retro-leaning recording career was eclipsed by her own epic self-obliteration. Already, Duffy has graced the racks at Starbucks, sold out New York’s legendary Apollo Theater, serenaded Regis Philbin on

morning television, and seen the increasingly ubiquitous “Mercy” featured on Grey’s Anatomy, rapped over by the Game, and covered by Bon Jovi. (“It’s a strange feeling when a person at that level is playing a song that I wrote,” she says. “It’s like, Oh my gosh, I’m really here now. Bon Jovi knows that I exist.”)

The timing is certainly suspect: On paper, Duffy (much like the 20-year-old Adele, a young Brit with chunky eyeliner and a throwback haircut) seems a little too predestined to pluck Winehouse’s puke-splattered tiara from the gutter. Although she writes her own lyrics, Duffy collaborated with a veteran scrum of songwriters and producers (including former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler) to create Rockferry’s thick neo-soul, and it’s tempting to dismiss the entire operation as a prefab plug for a freshly vacated hole. “Mercy,” with its snappy, girl-group melody, even sounds an awful lot like Winehouse’s “Rehab”—itself an homage—if you just swap out Amy’s “no, no, no” for Duffy’s “yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Still, Duffy’s prematurely blue pipes are particularly well suited to soul music, and while her voice evokes plenty of 1960s-era American songstresses (Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector), her most obvious antecedent is Dusty Springfield, another Brit who successfully schooled herself in Memphis soul. Matching mounds of blonde hair and aggressively darkened eyes don’t hinder the comparison.

Duffy laughs. “With the Winehouse thing, it’s the same as ‘I’m the next Leona Lewis, I’m the next Joss Stone,’” she says. “But Dusty, it’s like she’s right there.” She gestures to her shoulder. “I don’t get it. To get called ‘the new something’ means music is replaceable. It isn’t like new shoes. If someone kept shoving ‘the new Sam Cooke’ in my face, I would be like, ‘Fuck off, new Sam Cooke.’”

Duffy may not be aspiring to unseat any canon queens, but she’s still hounded by questions of propriety. Earlier this year, the R&B singer and rapper Estelle—herself a young, black British woman—dismissed Duffy’s and Adele’s success as the by-product of an industry that’s inherently racist. “I’m not mad at them, but I’m wondering—how the hell is there not a single black person in the press singing soul?” Estelle seethed. “As a songwriter, I get what they do. As a black person, I’m like: You’re telling me this is my music? Fuck that!”

Although Estelle has since backed off her remarks somewhat, Duffy insists that soul doesn’t, or shouldn’t, require a specific skin color, backstory, or set of credentials. For her, singing these songs, this way, is less an aesthetic choice than an emotional one. “Soul stopped being a genre about 1970,” Duffy declares, taking a puff of her cigarette. “It was black music that stemmed from gospel, from declarations of God and love and devotion, and was integrated to the whole world through Motown. I think it’s had a massive influence on all music, whether it’s the Arcade Fire or Prince or Gnarls Barkley or Jay-Z. Soul is just a form of honesty.”

GE T MORE VIDEO INTERVIE WS, PLUS AN EXCLUSIVE LIVE PERFORMANCE IN A BROOKL YN BACK YARD SPIN.COM/ DUFF Y-VIDEO