Listen to Paolo Nutini's "Jenny Don't Be Hasty"

As a child growing up in an apartment above his parents' fish-and-chips shop in Paisley, Scotland, nineteen-year-old Paolo Nutini never imagined a career as a singer-songwriter - let alone that he'd be rubbing elbows with his heroes while barely out of high school. Nutini has already performed with Ben E. King, whom he cites as his biggest musical influence, and he even opened for the Rolling Stones in Vienna. "I met the guys afterwards, and we had a chat," he says. "Mick thought I was Italian. When I told him I was Scottish, he laughed and said, 'If I'd known you were Scottish, I wouldn't have booked ya here!' "

SOUND Nutini says his debut album, These Streets - which has already sold 250,000 copies in the U.K. - tells the story of "three years of some teenage Scottish kid's life." His throaty, heavily accented singing voice has earned frequent comparisons to Joe Cocker and Faces-era Rod Stewart, though the ballads he sings have more in common with James Blunt and Daniel Powter. "My music has quite an eclectic mix," says Nutini. "It has elements of rock, soul, folk and even some electro."

HASTY EX "Jenny Don't Be Hasty," the lead-off track on These Streets, tells the story of a particularly nasty breakup with a girl he met in London a year ago. The then-eighteen-year-old Nutini told the twenty-three-year-old Jenny that he was twenty-two. "Soon as I told her the truth, she slapped me and sent me packing," he says. "Made me feel like an eight-year-old-boy. I haven't heard from her since."