Downtown's 4-month-old Grammy Museum is doing its part to get guests hip to Eleni Mandell's recent album, "Artificial Fire." The local chanteuse will bring her jazz-stoked pop songs to the institution April 14, engaging in a Q&A with museum chief curator Ken Viste before the performance. Tickets are $15 and come bundled, Prince-style, with a CD (2007's live effort "Voxhall and WUK").  

Mandell, long a local favorite, will perform in the museum's pristine 200-seat theater, which recently has played host to the likes of Tom Morello, Nas and Annie Lennox, among others. "Artificial Fire" sees Mandell exploring the pop songbook with a deft, vintage flair. "I got tired of the weepy, dark songs," she recently told The Times.

The singer-songwriter funnels personal experience through a melange of musical eras, creating lively story sketches

On a crisp Sunday morning, singer-songwriter and Los Feliz denizen Eleni Mandell wandered the flea market at Pasadena Community College in a slouchy cardigan and vintage sunglasses. She picked through tables cluttered with copper bracelets, picture frames and dusty velvet hats, any of which could serve as a mysterious prop in one of Mandell's retro-tuned torch songs.

Vendors manned the booths, watching for shoplifters who, some said, have gotten worse since the recession hit. Scanning with her martini- olive-colored eyes -- to borrow a description from "Personal," one of her latest burners -- Mandell spied a gold-and-white '50s bathing suit, saying it'd be great for the stage. It didn't fit, but it was easy to see what attracted her: a touch of glam but with character, a  storied emblem from another era.

"It's better to come here looking for nothing," she said. "You'll have better luck that way."

Fortune has worked in complex ways for the L.A. native gifted with a voice that's as smoky and coolly moderate as a chanteuse secreting a pearl-handled revolver beneath her dress in a noir novel.

There comes a time in everyone's life where they must take their personal mantra and throw it out the window. In the case of Eleni Mandell, her mantra had something to do with a scruff-voiced man fond of porkpie hats.

For her last six albums, Mandell has operated with the WWTWD? policy, as in What Would Tom Waits Do? But for her album out this week, "Artificial Fire," she had to take Waits and banish him from the studio -- metaphorically, of course.

"Tom Waits is the biggest influence on me," Mandell said in a recent stroll-interview we had at the Pasadena Community College flea market. "But I finally had to stop trying to emulate my heroes." It was an attempt to turn away from what Mandell called the "weepy, dark songs" to something that's "still dark, but danceable and fun."

Enter the title track, caught in shadowy play in the video above. Mandell, with the gently cutthroat players in her band, has concocted a sneaky brew based on the moment when a lover realizes she's been led to a treasure that's not true love but only artificial fire. Lovers and their endless follies isn't new territory for Mandell, who's mined the topic with varied combinations of quietly bleeding country reminiscent of Patsy Cline, cool jazz and singer-songwriter sketches, but she explores it on her latest album with more unflinching courage than ever before.

-- Margaret Wappler

Mandell celebrates the release of "Artificial Fire" at the Echo, 1822 W. Sunset Blvd. 8 p.m. Thursday.

Also, check for a feature on Mandell in Sunday's Calendar.