Cornelia Street is a short street in New York City’s West Village. On the end of its curve is the legendary red-and-white striped awning of Cornelia Street Cafe, the famed restaurant and performance space that over four decades has spawned the careers of many singers, jazz musicians, poets, and playwrights. Directly across the street is the Italian restaurant Palma, which has launched the career of just one artist thus far: the singer and producer Amber Mark.

Mark’s godparents own the restaurant, and Mark lives above it, as she has since high school. As I walk in and ask for her, a short, mustachioed man shuffles past and says with a mystic wiseness to no one in particular, “Ah, Amber Mark” and then heads out the door. As summoned, she appears, wearing a camo flight jacket, baggy khakis, and a wallet chain (which she later reveals is not even connected to a wallet). She whisks me through the restaurant like a good host, saying hello to everyone working there. The cooks, waiters, and bartenders all look like they want to goof on her for having to do an interview while at the same time being extremely proud of her for it.

The room she settles on for our conversation, above the restaurant and below its office, used to be her living room. She moved in with her godparents permanently in high school, when they legally adopted her so she could go to school in New York. Before that, she’d been traveling internationally with her German mother, from Berlin to Miami to India, before eventually settling in the city. Mark’s mother, a devoted painter in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, figures as the most important figure in her daughter’s music so far, and her death in 2013 is the subject of the suite of songs on Mark’s debut 3:33 AM EP, released a year ago; “Monsoon,” the record’s focal point and highlight, is a song about her flood of tears.