With one of her songs (Love Like This) heard on the hit MTV show The Hills and U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama using Unwritten on the campaign trail, British pop singer Natasha Bedingfield is doing her best to crack the North American market.

Yet all that work came at a price recently when Bedingfield cancelled her British tour not once but twice to promote her latest album, Pocketful Of Sunshine, on this side if the pond.

"It's definitely a new challenge being a global artist," she says during a Canadian promotional stop in Toronto. "It means you have to try to plan better, you have to try to be everywhere at once but I'm only one person.

"What happened is that I released the album in the States, it went to No. 3 in the first week and that was a similar time to when the (British) tour was booked. My record company wanted me to stay out there. It was terrible, I hate promising the fans and then it doesn't happen. It should never really be cancelled."

Bedingfield, 26 and sister of fellow pop singer Daniel Bedingfield, released her second album, NB, last year. Pocketful Of Sunshine contains a handful of songs off that record as well as new material.

"There are so many new ways of getting your music heard nowadays and the fact is that an album is not as concrete a thing as it was," she says. "So with this album I wrote a few extra songs and I put them on and kept the album up to date, which was kind of cool. I didn't have to wait a long, long time before the next one came out."

The new album is a summery, breezy pop affair led by "simple songs" such as Put Your Arms Around Me and Love Like This, which features a duet with Sean Kingston. Other numbers garnering attention are the groovy Pirate Bones and Soulmate, the latter Bedingfield wrote after reading the John Gray bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

Bedingfield is especially proud of the closing Not Givin' Up, a somewhat soulful but radio-friendly pop song in the vein of Pink or Adele.

"That's about an argument and when you're at a point in your relationship where you're trying to think, 'Am I going to let go of this? Is it worth it?' " she says. "And it's at that point where you realize that I've got more invested and more in common in this relationship. I'm going to stand on that common ground and move it forward. That comes from a real situation and you can hear it in my voice, there's a kind of angst there."

Bedingfield just signed off on a North American headlining tour for the coming months with Canadian dates expected. She also recently performed as part of the Canadian Idol auditions in Toronto in mid-April.

"That was great," she says. "It was raining so it really punched home how determined these people were. It was the very early part where people are auditioning for the audition and some of them had been waiting since four in the morning in the square. You could just feel that enthusiasm."

And while successfully breaking into two markets, Bedingfield says there's not much difference when it comes to the paparazzi and celebrity magazines in the U.S. and the U.K. The fact she's known for a rather tranquil lifestyle compared to the likes of Amy Winehouse or that Spears woman doesn't hurt either.

"I don't have a big problem. I work for them and they (the paparazzi) work for me," she says. "I'm not hunted in the same way that some people are. I think it's just the fact that they can't catch me. I'm too quick, too sneaky."

Happy to perform in virtually any medium

Natasha Bedingfield has used many avenues to get her music heard but performing in a virtual world was a first for her.

Bedingfield recently staged a virtual concert for the children's website Habbo.com, singing while her online avatar performed in sync.

"It was cool," she says. "Habbo is like (the strategic life-simulation computer game) Sims, it's like one of those online virtual worlds but for kids. I actually did something for Sims recently where I did a song in the Sims language Simlish. It was great. It was just a bit of fun."

And while some artists are steadfast in refusing to have their songs in advertisements, Bedingfield embraces the various platforms readily available to musicians.

"I think that, for me as a songwriter, I sit there in a room and I make music and I write for me but I'm also thinking about the people that are going to listen to it," she says. "And you have to have ways that people can hear your music and see your art. That's the whole point of expressing yourself -- it's for you and for other people."

As for the only problem Bedingfield has with her new album, Pocketful Of Sunshine, she says it might be a song title.

"Piece Of Your Heart should actually be called Craziness," she says of the song that has the lyric, "When the craziness begins to get to me" in the chorus.

"I gave it the wrong title at the last minute. It was a last-minute decision, I changed it to Piece Of Your Heart but Craziness is a better title for it."