AMERICAN singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst's latest album, Strange Conversation, is a meditation on art and its ability to speak across time and distance.

How apt she should end up playing the moorland outback of The Band Room, Low Mill, Farndale, tomorrow night, in the company of her fellow musician husband, Jeffrey Foucault.

"I do love playing small venues and I gave my agent the nod to find somewhere a little out of the way like The Band Room," says Kris, who lives in small-town New England.

"It's a straight co-bill, where we usually do something together, though we don't have a polished routine. We'll just do what comes to mind."

A similarly ad hoc approach led to the subject matter of her fourth album, released through Rounder Europe in June this summer.

"It was pretty accidental, like so many good things are. I'd written a song from a poem a few years before and then I'd stored away in my brain the idea of doing more songs based on poems," says Kris.

"Then I stumbled across the Robert Browning poem and I read the first stanza and straightaway it felt like the rhythm was there for a song and the melody was there too.

"Something about art speaking across time struck me and it just clicked, and by the end of the day, I had three more songs."

Some poems are set verbatim to music, some dismantled and reassembled in new renditions, others used as the jumping-off point for Kris's lyrical take.

"The more I moved away from the text, the longer they took. I always borrowed some language, but sometimes you just take a few threads and create a new mood with your own lyrics. One song came from a Walt Whitman poem, a very long Whitmanesque piece where he went on for about 30 pages and I just picked out one image and framed the song around that," she says.

"I don't think I've ever been so dogged about something, finding the right musical settings, and I tried out so many to find the ones I wanted. I treat myself as a sounding board to see where it goes."

Tomorrow, her destination is The Band Room, just the offbeat place to bounce poetic thoughts off the wood-panelled walls.

Kris Delmhorst & Jeffrey Foucault play The Band Room, Low Mill, Farndale, tomorrow. Doors open at 7.30pm; tickets £10 on 01751 432900.