Jesca Hoop is gleefully pulling a wad of vintage lace out of her shopping bag. Layer after layer appears – is a grandmother somewhere being deprived of her curtains? “No, it’s a dress!” cries a delighted Hoop, the pixieish Californian singer-song-writer who has just been touring the UK with Elbow. Getting up on stage allows her to glam up appropriately – this is not the sort of creation she could have worn in any of her previous lives.

Like when she used to run boot camps for teenagers, taking them out to sleep rough in the mountains of Arizona, or when she lived in a hut beside an apple orchard and pillaged food from dumpsters by night, or when she was a nanny to Tom Waits’s kids. Or when she was growing up, the middle child of five Mormon siblings, preparing for a life of religious servitude. She rebelled against that, but says her songs are her service now – they certainly leave the audience spellbound. You can see why Tom Waits has said: “Her music is like swimming in a lake at night.”

There’s Murder of Birds, which she recorded with Gus Garvey of Elbow. Seen performed at a small solo gig in London, the song really is that rare thing, a sort of musical onomatopoeia, in which the melody darts in and out of view as the title suggests, as light on the air as birds. (It’s not about killing – a murder is the term for a group of crows.) Her voice swoops in and pierces the high heavens and then the song soars down low into the strumming of her guitar.

When you meet Hoop, 33, her conversation can take similarly surprising turns. She tells you about the time she decided to go to work in construction but it was too physically tough so she decided to move to an apple orchard: “I was looking for a run-down place that I could rent for nothing and fix up but when I found the shack in the orchard I was, eurgh, no no no, this is really bad. There was a bottle of piss next to a very nasty bed, used condoms beside it. The person who works the orchard would use it once in a while. But then I took a deep breath and said, well it can be gutted and reroofed, I can do it. So I moved in.” She stayed for five years.

As for the kids’ camp, a hard-core programme for 12 to 18-year-olds: “Basically it’s a deprivation camp. The kids are deprived of, one, everything that defines them, and two, everything that keeps them comfortable. They have a sleeping bag, a string, a cup, no flash-lights. There’s no camp as such – you’re just walking through the high mountain desert in Arizona. My job was to guide these kids through the passes.”

This went on for two months. Didn’t the kids go mad? Didn’t she? “Oh yeah! The kids are mostly from wealthy backgrounds but some are sent by the state, and some are kidnapped by their parents – they literally wake up and they’re in this place. They throw fits. They scream. Sometimes it was so, so hard. I did quit eventually – I was just, like, I can’t do this any more.”

She loved living with Tom Waits, his wife Kathleen and their three children. Jim Jarmusch used to come round, but otherwise they are “a very private family”. Was she the sort of nanny who is a substitute parent, or one of the kids? “Oh definitely one of the kids, although I did learn that you can’t ride on the hood of the car – oh, but the cars were one of the greatest things about working for Tom, because he has these old Cadillacs – one which I dented, one which I filled up with diesel fuel. Yeah I got into big trouble, ha ha.” She was reluctant to show Waits her own songs. “It took me a year; they knew I was a musician but I didn’t talk about it. I would sing in the house because I always do, but I didn’t want them to think that I was exploiting them in any way.

“So I needed to be really careful. But when they felt I was ready as a songwriter they did send my work to their publisher, and things started to happen then. And actually on the last day of my work there Tom taught me Summertime on the guitar. I think he’d wanted to do it before but we never took the time. I was just so shy.”

Less so now – she’s been taking advice from her great buddy Garvey, who befriended her after he hunted her down to play on his radio show, and interviewed her on air, on the phone, live from her bath. “He always tells me, ‘Tell ’em what’s what, Hoopster. Show ’em how it’s done.’ ” Lets hope she takes his advice.

Jesca Hoop’s Kismet Acoustic EP is out on Last Laugh/Nettwerk

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Vote for the Breakthrough Award winner
• David Tennant back as Hamlet after back surgery
• Matt Smith is the new Dr Who