Ellinor Miranda Salome Olovsdotter isn’t quite a household name yet, but she’s spent the past few years attracting plenty of attention from those who are.

EDM giants Skrillex and Diplo are not only professed fans, but favoured collaborators with the Stockholm-spawned 30-year-old known to her fans as Elliphant. When not producing her songs, TV on the Radio guitarist Dave Sitek loves hanging out with the singer at his Los Angeles home, the two happily sitting around and discussing art as friends. Katy Perry has weighed in as a high-wattage admirer, Tweeting—unprompted—her admiration for Elliphant’s visually stunning “Down on Life” from 2013 with “One of the most bad ass music videos I’ve seen in a long time!”

Building her street cred to unassailable levels, Elliphant has appeared in songs and videos alongside genre-mashing Scandinavian renegades like Tove Lo and MØ. But she’s also worked with the kind of songwriting giants that only A-listers usually get access to, the shortlist including professional hitmaker Dr. Luke and ever-outspoken rapper Azealia Banks.

What might be coolest about all of this is that, as Elliphant gets ready to hit the road to promote Living Life Golden—her sophomore album and first true assault on the American charts—none of this appears to have gone to the singer’s head. When she’s reached in a New York City hotel room, the first thing she does is apologize for seeming unfocused at the top of the interview, admitting that’s because she often is.

“I’m becoming professional with the packing because I’m constantly packing and unpacking,” Elliphant says, speaking with a pronounced but charming Swedish accent. “But everything is messy in my hotel. I’m good at making everything organized inside the bag, but as soon as I open it up… Well, it’s like a nuclear bomb went off in here.”

That Elliphant is surrounded by something that looks like a Big Apple hotel-room version of Hoarders doesn’t bother her.

“The cleaner I am in my head, the messier that I get in my life,” she says philosophically. “When I am clean and pure in my head, I’m able to really focus on what I have to do in my life: get out there, meet people, talk, make art. All this other bullshit, things like taking care of the laundry, becomes second place.”

Elliphant is in New York rehearsing for a tour that will see her play intimate clubs, somewhat surprising considering her various YouTube videos mostly have views that are in the millions. (Shot at stunning locales in Iceland, “Down on Life” has been seen over five million times; lensed in Jamaica, the ganja-scented dancehall jam “Music Is Life” has eclipsed two million views.)

Despite various boosters and heavy YouTube exposure, Elliphant is in many ways just starting to make herself known as a live entity. Boding well for getting her name out there as a performer is that—like many of those who find superstardom—she’s got a larger-than-life personality.

Ask, for example, how it is she sings in Jamaica-via-IKEA-accented English on many of her songs—including those that make up Living Life Golden—and she launches into a story as unlikely as it is awesome. The dub-heavy bass lines and reggaefied guitars that buoy dance-floor-detonating tracks like “Love Me Badder” and “Step Down” can be traced not to Kingston, but instead the Far East.

“The first time I had the chance to do music was in a reggae bar in Bangkok,” she says. “I was waiting on a visa so I had to stay in Bangkok for two weeks, and I was going there to the bar a lot because it was by my hotel. Bangkok was liberating for me. When I grew up I was a very pretentious child who only listened to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I never gave myself that smiley music moment. When I had the chance to get into the roots of Jamaican music, the whole dancehall thing—all the beautiful pop melodies, but with subjects I could relate to—that’s where my interest started.”

If Elliphant is relentlessly interesting, it’s because so is her story. She was labelled ADHD in school, and with that label came self-esteem issues. The singer for the longest time was convinced that she wasn’t really good at much beyond working in restaurants, at which she excelled due to her beyond-outgoing personality.

“I have an artist’s soul—I’ve always been making things ever since I was a kid,” Elliphant says. “But the first time that I ever got something back from my art was when music came into my life. Music isn’t coming from someplace where it’s like I have to sing. I never had some feeling of ‘I have to bring this to the world.’ It’s more about how I was looking for friends as a human being. When I realized that people wanted me, wanted to be around me, that was a big relief. And if people want more, I’m going to give it to them.”

Angry and almost antisocial in her teens, she was eventually saved by a love of travelling. As anyone who’s ever gotten on a plane and pushed themselves out of their comfort zone knows, there’s nothing more life-changing than immersing oneself in other cultures, no matter how foreign they may be. Raised as something of a wild child by a former wild-child mom, the singer had her outlook on life rocked when her grandmother took her to India in her mid-teens.

If travelling did anything for her, it was teach her that the most important thing we can be as humans is empathetic, embracing differences rather than being afraid of them. It would also teach her to expand her horizons, to always be open to new things. Which brings us back to that Bangkok bar, which in many ways served as the springboard to where she is today.

“There was a cute guy there,” Elliphant continues, “and I wanted to make out with him, but he didn’t want to make out with me. He didn’t even care about me. So one day I took the mike and sang to him, a poetry thing that I freestyled on the reggae beat. He was like, ‘Wow, this is so good.’ In the night we went to some really sleazy studio in Bangkok, went through a bottle of whiskey, and jammed. They put up a MySpace for me with the really weird, sloppy stuff that I did that night. It all kind of started there. Later on, when I started to sing, that’s the kind of stuff that I did. If it had been a rock bar in Bangkok, probably I’d be singing rock now.”

Elliphant plays Alexander Gastown on Saturday (May 7).