Izzy Bizu on the heart of her music before her Sprint Center show on Tuesday

British singer Izzy Bizu’s rise to prominence has been rather amazing. In the past five years, she’s gone from the standard pop sounds of SoundGirl to the soulful tunes of her solo debut, A Moment of Madness, a danceable set built for fans of Amy Winehouse. Last year, her cover of Edith Piaf’s “La Foule” was the theme for the BBC’s coverage of the Euro soccer tournament, and now she’s opening a string of dates for Coldplay. It’s a heady trajectory, and at the heart of it is a young woman who, at 23, has already had a career that artists a decade her senior might envy. I spoke with Bizu by phone the morning after her first New York show, right before she kicked off her dates with Coldplay.

The Pitch: How’d you come to record that Edith Piaf cover?

Izzy Bizu: It was really random: I’d just left college, and I was working a couple jobs. I got fired from one of my jobs, and I was like, “I need to do something,” because I’d just gotten out of music college, and I was writing songs in my bedroom, and songs with my guitarist — but casually. Just a bit of fun, really.

I went to see my dad in Sussex, and I saw his brother — my uncle — and asked him, “What did you do last weekend?” And he was like, “I went to a wedding,” and I was like, “Who’s wedding?” and he said, “My daughter’s.” I didn’t even know he had a daughter! What the hell? So, I was like, “Give me her number. Now.”

She lives in London, half an hour away from me, and I’m like, “I need to get to know this chick.” She has this house in Brixton, and we start chilling, and I’m like, “What do you do?” and she says, “I run a music company,” and I’m like, “Really?! I sing!” and she’s like, “What? That’s crazy,” and it was so funny.

She has this open-mic night, and asks me to do it. I didn’t do it for six months, because I didn’t have the balls to do it, because I wanted to practice and stuff. I finally did it, and she’s like, “Do you have any songs?” I showed her the songs, and she’s like, “All right, let’s record it.” We got an engineer and went in and recorded it, just raw. Piano, guitar, vocals — just a couple-takes sort of thing. That’s how the [Coolbeanz] EP happened.

All because you had a cousin you never knew about?

Yeah. It was that, it was dropping out of college, it was meeting my guitarist — it was all these things. These perfect imperfect moments that just all happily happened.

That’s amazing. And now, you have this amazing album which came out last year that makes me want to get up and dance every time I hear it.

Aw, that’s amazing. I’m glad that it makes you smile.

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When you went into the studio, were you going for a specific sound?

All I knew when I went into the studio is that I love soul music and I just wanted to jam with other musicians. I just wanted to go into a studio and pick up a microphone and just jam. It wasn’t even really like, a band. Someone would pick up a bass, someone would play keys, someone would play guitar, someone would be on the beat, and we would all jam. I’d pick up the microphone, and we’d do sort of a one-take thing. We’d work out five jams, and we’d listen back to them: “Oh, that sounds cool! That sounds cool!” And then, we’d start developing the songs from there.

We added different elements to it from there, and I was like, I absolutely love horn, One of the first musicians I worked with did horns so beautifully, and after I did that one song, “Diamonds” — which has strings on it — I was just like, I knew what I wanted to go for. “Diamonds” is the first album song I did, and it all kind of developed slowly. I didn’t really have a plan in my head. I didn’t know what I was doing when I walked into that studio. I just wanted to write songs about how I felt and we just developed it from that sort of feeling.

Did you grow up with a bunch of soul music?

My mom played soul music. She played a lot of Ethiopian music as well. She played jazz, too. My father listened to Pavarotti. I don’t know if you hear the influence at all in my music. [laughs] No, but you know what? Pavarotti is so amazing. I mean, I know he is opera, but I think he’s really soulful, as well, in his own right. He has such passion! I would watch him, and it would be like, he’s literally just baring his heart and soul on the stage. All these different influences — all these artists and music — even if it’s not the same as mine, really did influence me, in a way.

I can definitely hear that passion in your songs, and it’s kind of cool how Ethiopian music and soul have that connection with a passionate horn section as well.

Yeah, there’s some good Ethiopian jazz out there. But, the influence I have from that is — when you go there and go out to a gig, or if you go to a bar, sometimes there won’t be a sound system. If you to a really traditional bar, you’re sitting in a hut in a circle, and there’ll be a girl in the middle and she’s singing, unamplified. She’s dancing and she’s singing, and then she’ll sort of say something to someone as a joke, and sort of take the piss out of them in Ethiopian, and they’ve got to come up with a comeback.

Now, if they don’t come up with something, they’ve got to to come up with an Ethiopian birr, which is less than a dollar, and they lick it and stick it on her forehead, and that’s how she makes money at a gig. She’s, like, proper interacting with the crowd, and it’s just really lighthearted, and it’s funny. It’s really cool, and what I got from that was just the closeness and the warmness that you have with the audience, and making them feel like how you are as well.

How do you take that feeling of closeness and translate it to an arena show?

I’m going to figure that out tonight. [laughs] I don’t really have a plan. I’m going to have to feel it out. I’ve never played in front of this many people in my life. Every night’s different. You have to feel the energy and see what they feel like. You don’t know: They might be really chill. They might be really excited. Some people might be tired from work … [laughs] You might energize them, maybe get them to sing along a little bit — that might be a start.

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Are you touring with a full band and a horn section behind you?

Actually, no. I’m doing the complete opposite and doing an acoustic version, which is super-fun. I’m going to be playing piano, and then folks on guitar and bass and also on the piano and electronic-drums thing — it’s sort of like a synth vibe. It’s got smaller, but it’s cool because I love doing things acoustically, and this being somewhere between acoustic and solo live stuff — it’s how I started, really.

Izzy Bizu opens for Coldplay at the Sprint Center on Tuesday, August 15. Details on that show are here.