A rare bird from Canada's musical woods, Lily Frost is inspired by spiritual exploration, human relationships, achieving the impossible, and long espressos. A serious musician who plays her own guitar and writes all her own songs, she's released 8 albums to date (including her work with seminal lounge group The Colorifics). Her work is cinematic, blending film noir, stark minimalism, cinematic images, and coruscating, soul-stabbing honesty.

It's been said of Lily that she "seems to have been born under a sign that flashes cool." She's an old soul who sings immortal music appealing to young and old-anyone who's ever been in love, basically, known its vertiginous joys and bittersweet afterburn. Like her signature drink, the espresso martini, she's both intoxicating and invigorating, smooth and silky and always leaves you wanting more.

Raised by born-again Christians, she drank too much and drove too fast and knew by age 16 all she ever wanted to do was sing. Restless as an artist and a person, she bounced from Montreal to Vancouver, looking for new styles, new ways of being, and new sounds. She joined the "lounge" scene—but hers is a talent that could never be bound by a single decade or style or schtick. She moved to Cairo to sing every night in a restaurant (where a wealthy businessman asked the long-legged, breathtakingly beautiful singer to join his harem: "I jumped out of the car and ran," she laughs), later to Tahiti and beyond.

Her music is impossible to describe, utterly unique, in a category of its own. Slinky, cool, with haunting melodies and dreamlike imagery, exotic, rhythmic, in the Parisian chanteuse tradition of Francoise Hardy, but utterly modern. She "seduces audiences with her sultry serenades," as one (perhaps slightly smitten) newspaper writer once put it. She herself has described it as "dim candelight stuff, makeout music with Latino flavouring," which is maybe as close as words can get. Her music's been featured in a popular Telus ad ("Who's that singer?" everyone asked when it came out), on the soundtrack to the movie Crazy Beautiful starring Kristen Dunst—and recently "Enchantment" from Cine-Magique was featured on ABC's ultrapopular drama (and great showcase for independent music) Grey's Anatomy.

A full, rich life, which may now be on the brink of its most interesting phase. "Here I am on the edge of success," she sang on her last-but-one album, Situation, "and I'm thinking I should start having babies."

"I guess I'm afraid of actualizing/Of becoming who I know I can be...I want to sabotage...everything," she sings in an incongruously sweet voice.

And she's had her baby, Meesha Moon, and it's only made her stronger. Her newest album, Cine-Magique, made with her husband, By Divine Right's Jose Contreras, is a masterpiece of moody melodies, soaring singing, and cinematic images. Her music is haunting, subtle, complex-but, as the titles attest, it asks the simple, immortal questions: "Who am I?" and "Where is love?" And she makes statements that "Raise the Veil" on taboo issues and secrets you only share with your closest friends.

Lily is self-actualizing before our eyes, becoming what only one person on this planet can ever be: Lily Frost. She's been all over the world: sung in Africa, busked in New Orleans, survived on Ramen noodles, been signed to the majors and the minors, performed in Ella Fitzgerald's shoes, and left audiences in tears. But once you've let her into your heart, she'll stay in your heart forever.