Holly Cole may have taken the gloves off and made the switch from jazz crooner to pop diva - but she'll never be mistaken for one of the Spice Girls.

"I can't make a happy pop record," Cole admits, on the phone from her home in Toronto. "I tried and failed."

What resulted from her "failure" is Dark, Dear Heart, her first real pop album and most successful so far. It's already hit gold (50,000 copies sold) only four months after its release. She'll be doing much of it live during her sold-out show at the Winspear Centre on Monday.

For Cole, songs like Joni Mitchell's haunting River or the Beatles' I've Just Seen A Face (both of which can be heard on Dark, Dear Heart) are a whole lot more interesting than, say, MMMBop.

"MMMBop is such a happy pop song," she says with an audible sneer. "Everyone gets the same message. And that might be a valid message, but it's not very interesting. And when you give people something that's maybe darker, more ambiguous, it gives everyone a different message and it becomes something more interesting, more personal."

Cole is a self-described "control freak" and incredibly picky about the material she sings. So much, in fact, that "I outright refuse to record a song just because I wrote it." She laughs, "I wish that more people had that motto."

Not that she has any burning desire to write her own stuff. Picking great songs happens to be an art in itself, she insists. Meaningful lyrics are what Cole looks for, which might explain why she did an entire album of Tom Waits on her last release, Temptation.

"I've described Tom Waits as a poet trapped in a musician's body," Cole says. "He really is an astounding lyricist. And that is something that is really rare nowadays.

"Now it seems to be more important how many hard bodies you have in your video rather than how good the lyrics to your song are.

"Generally, I'm motivated by lyrics and one of the reasons why is not because the lyrics are more important than the music, but because they're much, much harder to find. If someone sends me a song that's really great lyrically, but musically is bad, there's so much I can do. I can change the melody, I can change the harmony, I can change the instrumentation, I can change the arrangement. I have the whole sonic palette to do whatever I want. I can fix it. But you can't fix bad lyrics."

Spoken like a true record producer. Cole's actually been asked - twice - to produce other artists' albums, but she simply didn't have the time. For all her expertise and experience in the studio, the stage is what she lives for.

"If I had to give one thing up, it would be records in a flash, not live performance. I'm at my happiest - well, maybe happy isn't the right word - I'm at my most intense on stage. So I am informed by my live performances. We toured Temptation for two and a half years and that gave me the information for what I wanted to do on my next record. That's how Dark, Dear Heart came about."

And now that Cole has relinquished the crown of Canadian jazz queen, does she have any advice for Diana Krall, who seems to be following in Cole's footsteps?

"She's much more of a purist than I ever was," Cole says. "Even on my first record I did songs like I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. We were never really traditional jazz. I don't have any advice for her. I think she's doing great."

Still, Cole grudgingly agrees that Krall might not get all this attention were it not for her good looks.

Cole sighs, "The music industry's so screwed up in so many ways and that's one of them. It doesn't look like it's about to really change. I think it's changed somewhat, for the better - and then the Spice Girls come along."