Carla Bruni, an Italian-born supermodel turned singer, has been making headlines around the world for her relationship with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, which started late last year. Though her 2002 album of folky pop songs made her a music star in France, Ms. Bruni is better known in musical circles in the U.S. for her back-to-back relationships with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger in the 1990s. Now the question is whether Ms. Bruni’s gossip-column fame can help launch the U.S. release of her second album, an English-language collection called “No Promises.”

Ms. Bruni’s music is folky pop, with some blues flourishes. On the new CD she sings poems by the likes of William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson to her own original melodies and instrumentation.

For a music industry beset by plummeting CD sales, ever-tighter radio playlists and other ills, artists who come with a pre-existing public profile can be valuable. Consider the string of successful albums released by “American Idol” contestants, who are effectively minor television stars before they release music commercially. Clearly, this is far from a sure-fire formula. Despite endless tabloid exposure, Paris Hilton could garner almost no commercial traction when she released her “Paris” album in 2006.

Raised by a billionaire industrialist father and a concert pianist mother, the 40-year-old Ms. Bruni started modeling at age 19. Over the next 12 years she parlayed early gigs for Guess jeans and various high fashion houses into an estimated 250 magazine covers. Shortly after retiring from fashion in 1997 at age 30, Ms. Bruni began writing song lyrics for French singers Julien Clerc and Louis Bertignac, and was soon writing complete songs of her own.

Ms. Bruni launched her singing career with the 2002 album of her own French-language folk-pop compositions, “Quelqu’un m’a Dit,” which sold a whopping 1.2 million copies in France. (The album has sold another 800,000 or so copies in the rest of Europe.) Her music has been generally well received by French critics, although some edgier magazines have given her a hard time for being so mainstream. Her success made Ms. Bruni France’s answer to Norah Jones; one music magazine there recently said, half-seriously, that seemingly everyone “aged seven to 77 was seduced” by the album’s breathy chansons.