Record Deal Means Kerli Can Ditch the Rice-Only Diet

(andPOP) - It's Kerli Koiv's second interview today. The Estonian native is busy promoting her debut album, Love Is Dead, a gothic mixture of Bjork and Amy Lee that boats L.A. Reid as executive producer.

"I've never released an album before," she tells andPOP, "which I'm actually really happy about because before, I wasn't ready as a person and as an artist. I feel like I am now."

Kerli (she doesn't use her last name) was born in Elva, a Soviet-occupied town, in 1987, and lived in Estonia until she was 16.

"My home was abusive," she says, "and the country was communist until I was four. It has really beautiful nature but a really restricted mindset, and for somebody like me it was really hard to live in a place like that. I was always struggling and felt like I didn't belong, and that forced me to create my own fairy tale escape. When you look at my videos, when you look at the album art, I've had this in my head since I was 14 years old."

When Kerli was 16, she entered Eurolaul, a televised competition created to determine the song that would represent Estonia in the 2001 Eurovision Song Contest. It was "kind of like Estonian Idol," she says. "The prize was a record."

She won the prize, but the record deal went south and Kerli left home. "I started travelling to Stockholm to write music," she says. "I wrote with every songwriter in Sweden." Kerli lived in Stockholm for two years "without being signed and without any hope of being signed but I knew that's what I had to do," she says.

"Once I lived for three months in the first floor of an abandoned house. I slept on a foldable bed for three months. One room in that house was a studio, and people would come in the morning to work so I'd have to go out and it was winter, and I didn't have any money for food, so my mom sent me $100 a month. I ate only rice for three months. Rice with peanuts, rice with peas, that was just like, 'that's just what I gotta do, that's one step closer to my dream, no matter how hard it is.'"

Eventually her travels brought her to New York, where she scored an audition with Reid (producer of Avril Lavigne, Kanye West, Rihanna and Ne-Yo, among others), who signed her to Island Def Jam in 2006.

I ask if Love Is Dead - released today - was inspired by any one event in particular.

"It's hard to say," she says. "I wrote this album over five years, so there are songs on it I wrote when I was 17.

"A lot of the songs I wrote when I was really depressed, and then the later songs I wrote after coming out from my depression, so the theme of the album pretty much is overcoming obstacles and overcoming the darkness. I'm really grateful for all these experiences because I believe that until you are absorbed by darkness you can't overcome it and face the light."