On initial inspection, it may appear that Ballad of the Broken Seas, which brings together the talents of former Belle And Sebastian member Isobel Campbell with the rich tones of former Screaming Trees/occasional Queens of the Stone Age frontman Mark Lanegan, is a deliberate approach to make a much more down tempo country record than anything Campbell in particular has done in the past.

“It was just a progression,” she says in her soft Scottish accent. “I’ve always been into country but I’ve never been able to express it as well as perhaps I have on this album. I’ve loved country since I was 17 – the classic stuff.”

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra are the obvious calling cards for Ballad of the Broken Seas, but Campbell also includes names like Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell in her list of influences. “Also Gram Parson; I’m a really big Gram Parsons fan, and I really think Dolly Parton is amazing,” she says.

Combining her talents with Mark was a simple chance of luck and good timing. “I was looking for someone to sing a song that was kind of half-written, and a boyfriend at the time said ‘listen to this guy’, and he played me some of Mark’s records.”

Previously, she’d never heard of Mark, but was immediately won over by his incredible voice. Immediately she sent her details to his record company, and the next thing she knew she got word from her manager that he wanted to talk to her. “I’d just moved house and I was in my front room with no furniture and I just sat on the phone and he’d finished the song I’d written and he sang it down the phone. It sounded amazing.”

The end result was “Why Does My Heard Hurt So, with Campbell writing the melody but Lanegan penning most of the lyrics. “I thought anyone who was brave enough to sing down the phone you’ve got to give them a bit of respect,” she says with a giggle.

He does have one of those amazing voices that rips your guts out – so powerful, and so strong, but Campbell says it was the bass frequencies in his timbre that immediately appealed to her, and wanted to make her come up with Ballad of the Broken Seas. “There wasn’t any really decision-making, really,” she outlines as to how it all came together. “He was in Glasgow for the second or third time, and he was like ‘We should make a record’, so I thought I’m going to make sure we do. He was very encouraging to me, and he got me as a person and he got a lot of the music I was into.”

For fans of Mark Lanegan, for many this album will feel more like Mark and Isobel than Isobel and Mark – it’s much more typical of his work than it is Isobel’s, from her twee beginnings as a founding member of Scottish pop charmers Belle And Sebastian and onto her solo work.

“Perhaps,” she muses. “I wrote most of the songs. It’s weird… I played in Nottingham and this Mark Lanegan fan came up to me and said ‘you know, you’ve written better Mark Lanegan songs than Mark’. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but the thing is I love his voice. It was like a treat for me to work with that, and for years I’ve always wanted to write songs for other people and it seems like you have to know the right people to be able to do that. So for me it was a way of getting around people not knowing how to be in a position to write for other people was to get Mark to sing my songs for me.”

Campbell left Belle And Sebastian in order to be able to do own thing. With a big group of people, any self-respecting control freak is seriously curtailed. “I never do things because I’m intellectualising them, but I just follow my nose,” she states. “It just had to be done, like other things I do in life.”

Ballad of the Broken Seas is one of two records she has coming out in 2006. The second is called Milk White Sheets, and Campbell describes it as half-traditional acoustic songs and half new songs. Patently quite different to Ballad of the Broken Seas, she says that the folk elements are apparent in both. “I think of Ballads of the Broken Seas as a masculine/feminine record, and I think of this next record as a more female almost like lullabies, motherly record,” she explains. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the woods for the trees, so it’s really hard to know what’s going on but I do like it because it’s quite pagan, and female, and psychedelic. Those are things that appeal to me.”

The songs themselves weren’t quite written concurrently, but the impetus to being making Milk White Sheets did grow out of waiting on finishing Ballad of the Broken Seas. “Towards the end I was finishing the first album and I was waiting for Mark to post me back his vocals,” she explains, “and I was a bit bored and started doing Milk White Sheets.”

It sounds as if she was locked into a songwriting groove, and the only limitation was being able to get back into a studio again. “It’s a question of money,” she agrees. “If I had my own studio until I burnt out I’d be in there most of the time. It’s such a passion, whether I’m singing the songs or I’m getting someone to sing the songs. It’s amazing to have the seed of an idea in my head and then it’s on the record and it’s released all over the world. That’s like a bit of a drug for me.”

When it comes to touring Ballad of the Broken Seas, Campbell has yet to have the opportunity to play any shows with Lanegan – the original intention was that he would be playing a few shows, including an appearance on Later with Jools Holland, but they were fully booked. Instead, she has been touring with Eugene Kelly, from the Vaselines. “He’s a total gent,” she enthuses. “Hopefully one day I’ll get to do some shows with Mark. I’m doing some stuff with Howe Gelb, and I’m doing a show in Italy with him, and he might be a good foil for me as well. Mark has got to do a show with my one of these days; I’m just too shy to ask him now.”

If she’s too shy to ask him to play with her, how’s she going to ask him to make another album with her? “It doesn’t look like that,” she says in a voice tinged with sadness. “People have been saying who do you want to work with next, and I like a lot of people that are probably too ambitious – I’d like to work with Leonard Cohen, or someone like that. I just have to wait and see. I didn’t really plan to do this record with Mark; it just happened.”

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Ballads of the Broken Seas is out now.