THE MANY SIDES OF DIDO HIT ALBUMS AND CRITICAL ACCOLADES ARE ONLY PART OF BRITISH POP STAR'S STORY.

Byline: Sandra Barrera Music Writer

Last year was a good year for Dido. At year-end, record sales in Britain revealed that her new CD, ``Life for Rent,'' has outsold the competition. Now the British pop chanteuse has another reason to be in high spirits - her first-ever Grammy nomination for best female pop vocal performance for the song ``White Flag.''

``I was hoping for something,'' the 32-year-old singer says with a giggle.

Grammy nod or not, she had a good feeling about the contents of her latest disc. And rightfully so. Since its Sept. 29 release, ``Life for Rent'' has sold upward of 6.5 million copies worldwide and generated a hit single with ``White Flag.'' In January, Dido received three nominations for the BRIT (British Record Industry Trust) Awards, to be given out Feb. 17.

Like that electronic-tinged song about unrequited love, most all of the tracks on ``Life'' follow the same musical lines as Dido's previous work - except that the new set carries around a great deal more baggage about her personal life.

``I tend to write a lot about what's going on around me,'' she says, explaining that she excludes her life on the road whenever possible. ``The thing is when you're on tour, a lot of what's going on around you no one would be interested in hearing a song about anyway. So you finish the tour and you go home and you get on with your life and you write about it.''

In the case of this latest set, the album was inspired by Dido's breakup with a longtime boyfriend. The two were engaged to be married until she called it off.

``White Flag'' is her apology to him.

But Dido takes only partial credit for the Grammy-nominated song, which was co-written by Rollo Armstrong, her brother and songwriting partner.

``We write a lot of lyrics together, and he'll write these lines with incredible images, and then I'll sort of put much more real lyrics around it,'' she says. ``I can always tell what lines each of us has done because of that.''

She offers the example of ``Hunter'' off her 1999 debut, ``No Angel.''

If you were a king up there on your throne

Would you be wise enough to let me go

For this queen you think you own

Wants to be a hunter again

Wants to see the world alone again

To take a chance on life again

So let me go.

```The king upon your throne,' that's the sort of stuff he writes,'' Dido says. ``He doesn't play any instruments and so his whole thing is words. And I just love working with him because he writes all this stuff and then he gives me these little books of odd bits ... you can write a whole song out of them.''

The partnership has garnered praise from critics like Barry Walters, whose Rolling Stone review opines, ``Their continued collaboration prevents the usual second-album slump.''

In fact, the two have been working together since 1995, when Dido joined her brother's club outfit, Faithless.

But she left the group for a solo career, which was slow going at first. Her song ``Here With Me'' became the theme song to the WB sci-fi teen drama ``Roswell'' during its three-season run, which came to a close in 2002 on UPN.

It wasn't until Eminem sampled her song ``Thank You'' for the chorus of his 2000 hit ``Stan'' that things really picked up.

The album ``No Angel'' has since been certified platinum 12 times over and Dido has become a bona fide star in her own right. Then again, she's been preparing for it since age 6.

That's how old Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong was at the time she entered London's Guildhall School of Music, where she mastered classical piano, violin and recorder.

``For me, music was like this incredible escape ... and when I was given an instrument it just seemed like the best toy in the world because of all the things you could do with it,'' she says. ``It's like an endless game.''

Dido still toys around with musical instruments. Her newest is the guitar, which she admits to playing badly.

``I can sort of play,'' she says. ``But I start practicing, and I'm like, 'Ooh, a lovely chord,' and then I start writing a song so the whole thing goes out the window. It happens every time.''

Of course, it hasn't inhibited her ability to craft what critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes as ``tuneful modern folk-pop that sounds intimate while being confidently catchy and nicely atmospheric.''

Last year was proof of that.

``It's insane,'' Dido says. ``It's been so crazy I haven't really stopped to take in what's happened, and now I'm starting to realize just how amazing it's been.''

And it's not over yet.

Sandra Barrera, [phone]

sandra.barrera(at)dailynews.com

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(1) British pop chanteuse Dido's new CD, ``Life for Rent,'' outsold the competition last year, but she has another reason to be in high spirits - her first-ever Grammy nomination for best female pop vocal performance for the song ``White Flag.''

(2) no caption (Dido)