Fantasia Photograph by Randall Slavin

Fantasia

You might think you already know everything you need to know about Fantasia Barrino: the baby-mama drama; the underfunded gospel background; the long, hard struggle with illiteracy. It's all been well covered by the show (American Idol), the book (Life Is Not a Fairy Tale), the Lifetime movie (The Fantasia Barrino Story). But now you may need to get to know another Fantasia. ''I'm feelin' confident, feelin' sexy, feelin' hot,'' she says in that raspy-Fraggle giggle of hers. ''I'm feeling like a brand-new person, and I'm ready to sing about it!''

Though her debut album, Free Yourself, moved a solid 1.7 million copies, sales were largely confined to the urban and R&B markets, something that Fantasia would like to change with the follow-up CD. ''I want to be a household name, and I want to be able to cross over and do different things,'' she says. ''I'm like, let's do some stuff that will touch everybody, that everyone can groove to.'' To that end, she has recruited an impressive roster of big-name producers and collaborators, including OutKast's Big Boi (on the track ''Hood Boy''), Swizz Beats (who helms ''Surround You''), Gnarls Barkley's Cee-Lo, rapper Missy Elliott, and movie-ballad songwriting queen Diane Warren.

While her first album was heavy on cover songs, this time around Fantasia is trying her hand at co-writing her own material. It's all part of working hard to assert some post-Idol autonomy. She doesn't have a bad word to say about the cultural juggernaut that launched her, but Barrino and her American Idol advisers parted ways early this summer. And she talks admiringly of Kelly Clarkson, who made the stratospheric leap from a respectable first album to an airwaves-ruling, multiplatinum sophomore release. ''[Kelly] had more imput on her second album,'' Fantasia says. ''She knew what she wanted, she had the vision. You can work with a lot of producers, and you can have people give you songs and you just sing them, but it's a difference when it's what you want to do. You go in and you just kill it.''