“Well,” begins 30-year-old performer Lindsey Stirling, as she settles into the best kind of anecdote – a Celine Dion anecdote. “I was wearing these heels – I never perform in heels – and yet, I was wearing really tall hells… I remember being really nervous that I was going to fall over.”

Stirling was on stage with pop’s prima donna at the Billboard Music Awards earlier this year, to accompany her on the electric violin for a rendition of “The Show Must Go On”. “Holy cow!” Stirling exclaims endearingly in a melodic American accent. “I’ve loved her music since I was, you know, gosh, forever! I’ve always just thought she was incredible. I’ve always wanted to go to her live show and so the fact that I got to meet her and perform with her on such an emotional song that was such a special moment for her, it was unreal. I even had to kinda keep turning around during the performance just to look at her cause she’s so spectacular. I was like, ‘oh my gosh I can’t believe she’s there! In her gold dress and all her glory, and I’m playing with her you know!’”

So, you must be wondering, how does Stirling, amongst a million other violinists in the world, come to stand alongside Queen Celine? With a number 2 US album (2014’s Shatter Me) under her own belt, a quarter-finalist spot on America’s Got Talent and 8.5 million subscribers on YouTube, Stirling might not be Dion levels of diva yet, but she is a certified celeb. Her high-octane performances, combining her classically trained violin skills and dramatic self-taught dance have won her hoards of fans across multiple mediums.

Although her speaking voice is sugar-sweet and she says things like “holy cow”, things that no-one else has ever said earnestly, there’s something of a fighter within Stirling, glinting through when she explains just how her hybrid of talents came to be. “It kind of evolved. I was doing a competition and I was trying to earn some scholarship money for school and you know, I was just trying to make my violin performance fun.” Being “impressive” apparently didn’t ensure you made the cut. “It scaled because of competition with several other violinists. I was like, ‘how am I going to be different, how am I going to stand out?’”

Violin lessons had sprung from her parents’ influence as a child and after being fed orchestra music growing up, Stirling begged for lessons. Dance came later, after she began to “practice little movements here and there” and saw how the audience “responded so well to it and they really enjoyed it and they stayed, they smiled”, Stirling made it a permanent fixture in her routines. The rest is amped-up, supercharged, genre-crossing history.

You have to log online to grasp the full weight of Stirling’s fandom, with many of her epic music videos-cum short films clocking in tens of millions of views, and the growth of her following has snowballed alongside the ambition of her production. “I have quite the imagination,” she chuckles. “When we do bigger shows and bigger shows and bigger shows I keep getting to bring to life more ideas. I get to do more costumes, bring on more dancers and bring out more unique ideas, it really allows me to bring my creativity to life.”

Stirling’s flair for the unorthodox comes to life on her latest release, Brave Enough. “It’s about the bravery and the courage it takes to be vulnerable and let the walls down around your heart,” she explains softly. “We all guard ourselves and build up these walls to protect ourselves, but I wanted to learn to live life with more of an open heart.” Although remaining firmly within the boundaries of instrumental music, where anyone can take any interpretation of the meaning behind her sound, Stirling tracks her search to live vulnerably through themed songs. “There’s a song dedicated to gratitude, there’s a song dedicated to courage. Just all these different little layers that I had to kind of face or peel back or discover. The album starts out very closed and cold and as it goes, it gets warmer and warmer until the end represents where I hope to be some day.”

As if her accolades weren’t already enough, The Only Pirate at the Party, Stirling’s autobiography, was released at the beginning of this year, following a six month wait for fans after she announced its existence. Transferring her experience as a public speaker, sharing her trials with anorexia and life in the public eye, Stirling put pen to paper, inviting her fans in even further. “I really thought to myself, ‘I want to tell my story in the hope that it can inspire somebody else in theirs’. Whether it was sharing that I went through anorexia and I overcame it and I wanted to give people hope in that, and also sharing that I failed many times before I succeeded. I just thought that these are stories that people can learn from and grow from. Whilst there’s an audience right now, they’re listening to what I say, I might as well as say something I believe in!”

A do-gooder through and through, perhaps the most likeable quality of Stirling’s is that she hasn’t forgotten the fans who put her at the top of the charts and made her the highest ranked woman on YouTube. “That’s why people come to hear me speak, they have kind of been a part of the story of it all and they want to hear it.”