Singer Laura Cantrell tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON how signing to a new label has allowed her to look at her music in a different way.

JOHN Peel could spot a talent.

Not only the well-catalogued The Fall and The Undertones or the rushing blood of thrash metal, but typical of the late Liverpudlian, a wistful American country singer with the look of a Forties film star too.

Peel called Laura Cantrell's debut album, Not The Tremblin' Kind, "my favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life".

Laura, born in the country capital of Nashville but now steeped in New York life in Jackson Heights, is still something of a secret pleasure, although the country cognoscenti have been quick to turn her York debut on Monday into a sell-out.

Her third album, Humming By The Flowered Vine, was released last month by Matador, a label that should bring greater exposure as well as a chance to expand her mode of recording. "Absolutely. I was very eager, given the resources of the label, that it could front some money for recording, so I could look at it in a different way," she says.

"Earlier in my career, songs were done on a day's recording or at the weekend or on vacation time, and while I was really proud of them, there were some limitations - and though I don't think people listen to a record and say 'Oh, I wish the quality of sound was better', that was one of my goals.

"I also felt that having done two records with the same players and a similar approach to each record, it was time to open the tool box and add acoustic piano and keyboards and more violin."

Laura believed that songs such as 14th Street and Letters would benefit from a change of musical scenery. "I knew that some of the songs didn't have such a retro country feel but were more modern, and it was great to see where I could go. I could have made a similar record to before, but I wanted to push it, and so it was interesting to work with JD Foster, who's producing the new Calexico album. JD was in Dwight Yoakam's band in the early days, and I really wanted someone with long experience, so I knew he was someone I could feel excited about and comfortable with in the studio," she says.

"There's one song we did, Hammer And Nails, which we recorded with Calexico (and we've held over to a future release), but I just wouldn't have felt confident to ring Joey Burns and John Convertino on their day off, but JD did, and it was like, 'Hey, we've got sandwiches, come on over'!"

Given her eclectic choice of material, such as Emily Spray's 14th Street and the Appalachian murder ballad Poor Ellen Smith, it is surprising to hear Laura sounding so diffident about her judgement in the studio. Maybe it is more a case of deference, as personified by her admiration for fellow singer Lucinda Williams (whose July shows in Britain she was due to open until Lucinda's ear infection enforced their postponement).

"I've been a huge Lucinda fan since the late 1980s; from then on I've watched every move she's made, taking inspiration from her voice and music," says Laura, who covers a discarded early Williams recording, Letters, on her new album.

"In some way I would have been hesitant to do a well-known Lucinda song, like doing an Emmylou Harris song, and coming up with a pale comparison, but I have a friend, Nick Hill, who had worked for WFMV - where I do my radio programme in New Jersey - and he'd been friends with Lucinda in the 1980s. He used to say, 'you know if you got me to dig out my old Lucinda tapes, you might want to cover one'.

"He'd said this for years and I was curious but it's one of those things where you think, 'oh, it will just be an old box, will it ever come out?', but one day I said, 'you know that tape you have'... and he got it out. And there it was - a tape with 20 Lucinda Williams's songs from 1982, some of which she'd never released.

"Letters was on there, and when I heard it, it was interesting to me. When you think about Lucinda's geography, you think about her southern music but here was a song with New York references, and yet it was still full of the simple pathos she fills her music with."

If that discovery was one stroke of luck - Lucinda's seal of approval was forthcoming, albeit a long time coming! - then Laura had a "lucky coincidence" when she approached celebrated Brooklyn artist Fred Tomaselli to do the album artwork. "I'd done two albums named after song titles and felt it would be nice to do something different - and I was sick of my picture on the front cover. So I went to see Fred, who I knew from our neighbourhood. He'd done the last Magnetic Fields cover and Wilco put out a book last year that featured some of his work, and he showed me this piece that was intended for the book but wasn't finished in time.

"It was a picture of a hummingbird, and it went well with an image from the song Bees - the 'humming by the flowered vine' line, and it was more of a feminine piece, so it was perfect in a way that I could pounce on it!"

Laura Cantrell, National Centre for Early Music, York, Monday, 7.30pm, sold out.

Updated: 08:58 Friday, July 22, 2005