MY FAIR LILY By Keo Nozari Sassy Songs from a Soft-Spoken Girl

Talking with Lily Allen, you’d never guess she put out one of the sassiest releases of the past year. Her demure demeanor and shy responses are in stark contrast to her debut album Alright, Still, which brims with badass, sarcastic attitude. Hidden under sweet, breezy vocals and retro-calypso tracks, Alright, Still showcases the sharp-tongued remarks of a scorned British girl angry at boys, banks and the world—and who wants revenge. Revenge she got with a smash UK debut last summer that she parlayed into a surprise Top 20 Billboard release in the US in January.

Big single “Smile,” an all-out diss on her ex-boyfriend, is a great example of the acerbic punch her songs pack: “At first when I see you cry, yeah it makes me smile / At worst I feel bad for a while, but then I just smile.” In the video she proceeds to hire thugs to rob and beat him up, and later goes after the magnitude of his manhood in the song “Not Big.” But speaking to Allen, it’s downright perplexing that such venom can spew out of her. Perhaps having turned her woes into a No.1 UK hit took the edge off things, or she simply used all her cut-ups in the material itself, but we can barely get an ill word out of her when we ask if her ex contacted her when he heard the song. “No,” she relays in her soft-spoken voice, “but he sold his story to a newspaper in England. It was a kiss-and-tell story which my grandma had to read.”

Now under normal circumstances, this might inspire sympathy. But didn’t Allen herself diss her grannie on the 50 Cent parody song “Nan, You’re a Window Shopper,” taking gran to task for clipping out coupons, wearing thermals, having swollen ankles, springing a leak in her colostomy bag and being “mad as fuck”? Allen giggles bashfully, “I don’t think she really understands it. She’s come to a couple of gigs, but it’s not quite something she picks up on.”

In fact, no relative is safe from Allen’s witticisms: she goes after her brother on the track “Alfie,” calling him out for “smoking weed” and not getting laid—she even made him a puppet in her latest video! We wondered, how does he feel about it? “He likes it, and then he doesn’t like it. He kind of picks the days,” she confesses. “But he’s changed a lot since I wrote it. And when I wrote it I didn’t know it was going to be popular. I’m sure it’s weird for him.”

Weird indeed. But while we get the sense Allen doesn’t take her songs too seriously, she hasn’t been without some musical skewering herself. “Smile” inspired an “answer song” by rapper Example called “Vile” written from the perspective of the ex-boyfriend (although they never actually dated). “At first you smile, it was nice for a while, but then you turned vile,” he raps.

Vile or not, her family can breathe easier these days as Allen is currently on a 20-date North American tour and won’t be writing her next album until she returns home to England. “I have to write within the studio,” she explains. Considering the funny, animated, world-of-wonder perspective Allen writes from, she’ll certainly find plenty of amusing fodder in New York’s rich cast of characters. “I love New York—it’s sort of a home away from home,” she says. Maybe now her family—and ex-boyfriends—will be spared a little skewering of their own. But for the sake of our playlists, we just hope not too much.