If a Grammy nomination for an album featuring one of her songs wasn't enough, Fiona Joy knew the portents were off the charts when she stepped onto the Qantas flight back home from Los Angeles early this week.

"I looked at the Oasis channel [on the inflight entertainment] and they were playing Grace, which is on the Grammy-nominated album, and it was really cool," Joy said. "And [my 2013 album] 600 Years In A Moment was a featured artist album."

While not having the profile or the outrage quotient of Iggy Azalea, the hits of Sia and Keith Urban (all three Australians having been nominated for Grammy Awards this year) or the teen hysteria audience of Sydney quartet, 5 Seconds of Summer (who slightly controversially didn't get nominated), the north coast NSW-based Joy has a chance for her own brush with the world's best-known music award.

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Joy's song Grace was commissioned by Indian/South African duo Ricky Kej and the Melbourne-based Wouter Kellerman for their album, Winds of Samsara, which reached the top of the new age chart in Billboard. That album has now been nominated for a Grammy as best new age release, which is also victory for pianist, composer and latterly, vocalist, Joy, albeit one tinged with good-humoured regret.

"I can't get away from [being called new age], I'm trying really hard," she laughed, knowing that for many people anything called new age may as well say it's elevator music or soothing tones for a massage.

As Joy told Fairfax Media this year, she has been trying to escape the tag of new age for her recordings, seeing it as both a misnomer and a deterrent for potential fans, even as she won several awards in the field in the USA and Europe – one of the reasons Kej and Kellerman were keen to collaborate.

Joy's preference is for the style to be called contemporary instrumental music, which last year was given a separate category at the Grammy Awards.

"It just has a negative perception, particularly in Australia," she said of the term new age. "There is an existing market for it overseas but in Australia, though I was really determined to do the best I could, it was like wading through mud. And it doesn't matter how good the music is, some of the mud is going to stick."

Even if the term can't be shaken, Joy (who used to record under the name Fiona Joy Hawkins, before a divorce) is still working at expanding the scope of the genres in which she performs, beginning with the Indian-flavoured treatment of her song, Grace.

Grace has been recorded by an American flautist already this year and the song could become a real calling card for her irrespective of a Grammy win.

"I've also recorded a vocal version of Grace and a pop version of Grace," Joy said. "That song is going to have a few lives."

She hopes that "it could be my Orinoco Flow", the crossover hit for Irish singer Enya which took new age or ambient music into wide public consciousness. Being able to say Grace is on a Grammy-nominated album helps. Being able to say it's on a Grammy-winning album certainly won't hurt.

"The Grammys are really hard, it's very political," Joy said. "But now this opens doors for me next year with my new album."

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