HOW do you solve a problem like Nerina? The music press has been struggling to pin a label on the latest star in the singer-songwriter firmament, celebrating recent singles chart success with Everybody's Gone To War and coming to Oxford to play the Cornbury Festival on Sunday.

She's the new Dido. She's Carole King. Joni Mitchell. Kate Bush.

The truth is, when she was writing her current chart album Fires she was in the midst of her own identity crisis. No wonder, really. The London-born beauty is the daughter of a half-French father and an Indian showgirl mum. She spent her childhood being dragged around the world, from India to Australia, ending up mid-channel on the island of Jersey.

Musically, she had a classical training, then switched to jazz, and her first chart success was with a goth-rock dance anthem. She cites among her musical influences Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, the Beatles and Bon Jovi.

She sings breezy pop songs, with dark lyrics.

Now she lives in London, has a Los Angeles-based boyfriend, and spends most of her life on the road, a fact, I remarked to her, reflected in the lyrics of songs like Halfway Home, Damascus, Idaho ("In the back of a car on the road in the dark) and Heart Attack ("In a little while people and places will be so far behind").

"I'm glad you picked that up," she says. "It stems from feeling slightly nomadic. I come from a very mixed background ethnically, and I've lived in lots of different places. I've lived in London for 11 years, but I don't really feel like it's my home.

"I don't know where home is. I guess that's why I feel really comfortable travelling and playing shows."

"And Fires," she adds, "is a bit of a coming-of-age record. I was approaching 30, which was a landmark birthday for me, and I was looking at where life has taken me so far, and where I am going next.

"My grandmother was dying at the time, and I was very close to her. When you are older and you lose someone close to you, you start to question your own mortality. There was this whole thing of feeling that things were changing."

Things were indeed changing for Nerina, right, when Fires was conceived, and not, or so it must have appeared at the time, for the better. Her first album Dear Frustrated Superstar was loved by the critics and ignored by the buying public, and, following a spat with her record company A&R man (she slagged him off on a music industry message board) her record deal with Universal was abruptly terminated.

"Nobody would sign me," she explains, "but then my music publishers encouraged me and helped me to set up my own label.

"They put me in touch with Caroline, who became my agent, and my boyfriend produced the album, so it was a real cottage industry.

"Caroline was amazing, she put me on loads of tours if anybody came to town, I opened for them. And I used to sell CDs after the shows. I wasn't concerned about anything like chart positions, but six months later I'd sold 11,000 CDs, which may not be much in the scheme of things, but meant I was breaking even.

"And then I started getting a lot of radio airplay last summer with a song called All Good People, and I made the airplay charts, which was highly unusual for a complete start-up label.

"Warner Brothers had been keeping an eye on me, were impressed by that, and said they'd like to come on board and give me some more exposure."

With her album, re-released, high in the charts, Nerina is returning to Oxfordshire in rather more propitious circumstances than her last visit, to the New Theatre, a year ago. "I was supporting Suzanne Vega, but it was July 7, the day of the London bombings. The theatre was really empty it was a very eerie feeling."

And she's particularly excited about sharing a stage at Cornbury with The Pretenders. "I can't believe that I'm essentially opening for Chrissie Hynde," she says. "Chrissie Hynde has definitely been a massive influence on me. It's another of the heroes to add to the roll call.

"And I really like big crowds. The whole thing about a gig is that it seldom has much to do with musical prowess, it's about the energy and the vibe coming out of the crowd and on the stage."

The road will remain home for Nerina Pallot for the time being she's promoting the album in Europe and is playing a host of shows, including the V Festivals in August, before embarking on another tour in the autumn but the success of Fires means she travels forward much more self-assured. "It's enforced my view that you should really stick to your guns and be yourself."

The critics may struggle to pin an identity on Nerina add Avril Lavigne and Tori Amos to the latest list of comparisons but, in the words of her summer hit last year, "All good people have a sense of themselves, they never worry, they know what tomorrow will bring".

Nerina Pallot is appearing at the Cornbury Oxford Music Festival on Sunday. Tickets will be available on the gate at £40 for the day (£20 under-16s with a paying adult, children under ten free) or £70 for the weekend (Saturday and Sunday).