Laura Cantrell: Peel's protégé

Right at the end of a live show at the Jazz Café in London - a performance that had included tales of murder, heartbreak and drunken regret - Laura Cantrell hit a wall. She had dedicated her song "Bees" to the late John Peel - understandably, as Peel's support of Cantrell's work helped to launch her career. At the mention of the DJ's name, the audience erupted.

Right at the end of a live show at the Jazz Café in London - a performance that had included tales of murder, heartbreak and drunken regret - Laura Cantrell hit a wall. She had dedicated her song "Bees" to the late John Peel - understandably, as Peel's support of Cantrell's work helped to launch her career. At the mention of the DJ's name, the audience erupted.

It was a long time before Cantrell was able to speak again. When she did, her voice was broken with emotion. But she composed herself enough to sing, and the song, like much of Cantrell's work, was quietly, sweetly devastating.

"Bees" is a rumination on the death of an old friend. It is stacked with melancholy images of an abandoned hotel, and the persistent signal of an old crystal radio. "I'll be coming through," Cantrell's dying narrator intones, "on that wavelength I hearken to." In its emotional clarity, the song is typical of Cantrell. It is telling, too, that she uses the image of a radio: for 12 years, she has been the "proprietress" of Radio Thrift Shop on the New Jersey radio station WFMU, playing old-timey records that she has rescued from second- hand stores, and educating her listeners about the careers of forgotten country singers such as Molly O'Day and Rose Maddox.

"WFMU is a serious place. Even though everyone is a volunteer, they take their work seriously. It's more of an avocation: something you do because you want to, and something you want to be good even though you don't get paid for it. I've done it for 12 years, longer than I've been a professional performer, and it has given me confidence."

Like Peel, Cantrell is a music enthusiast, though it must have come as something of a surprise when the Radio 1 DJ hailed her first album, the 2000 release Not the Tremblin' Kind, as "my favourite record of the last 10 years, and possibly my life". Peel, though noted for his catholic tastes, was not usually an advocate of girl singers playing country music.

This wasn't the only surprising aspect of Cantrell's route to success. Until 2003, she worked for a Wall Street bank, playing music in her spare time. The first album emerged, circuitously, on Spit & Polish, the Glasgow label run by Teenage Fanclub drummer Francis Macdonald.

She recorded five Peel sessions, three of them at Peel's home. Once she had overcome her feeling of intimidation, Cantrell regarded Peel as a friend. She also found out why he was so keen on her records. Peel told her that when he was starting out as a DJ in Texas in the early 1960s, he made friends with people who were into honky-tonk music. "He understood that it was the music of their lifestyle and upbringing. He got the cultural significance. Even though my music's very different, I also have an appreciation of that stuff, and that does come out, especially on Tremblin' Kind, where there are lots of references to old music. I think those little touches reminded John of that period he'd spent in the States. He was sentimental about it."

Cantrell can be sentimental, too. Her new album, Humming by the Flowered Vine, is a prettily melancholic affair - from "Khaki and Corduroy", which looks back on her time as a student at Columbia University, to "Downtown", a poetic exploration of the monuments of her hometown, Nashville, and her current home, New York. Almost imperceptibly, the song shifts from childhood memories to Ground Zero.

'Humming by the Flowered Vine' is out now on Matador

Laura Cantrell supports Lucinda Williams' UK tour, starting at Shepherd's Bush Empire on 22 & 23 July, and headlines in Birmingham, 24 July, and York, 25 July