Cerys Matthews: Rage no more

She was a chardonnay-swigging Britpop star, who famously cracked under the pressure, but now Cerys Matthews is back on track. And, says Fiona Sturges, she's never sounded better

It's a scene that wouldn't look out of place in The Waltons. Three wooden cabins with creaky verandas and crooked chimney stacks nestle in the middle of a leafy valley. The area is surrounded by shimmering woodland in which foxes and coyotes can occasionally be spotted. All is silent save the chirrup of crickets and the odd gurgle of a frog.

This is White's Creek, an exquisite rural retreat-turned-recording studio 20 miles outside Nashville, and it's where I find Cerys Matthews, former singer of the Welsh band Catatonia, sitting out on the grass and soaking up the April sun. Matthews, 34, lives just two miles away with her new husband, the Nashville producer Seth Riddle, whose baby she's expecting.

The studio belongs to the musician Bucky Baxter, an ebullient character in cowboy boots and a checked shirt, who is best known as Bob Dylan's slide guitarist. He's also the producer on Matthews' first solo album Cockahoop, a gloriously stripped-down work that brings together American and British folk music along with a handful of new songs penned by the singer herself. It heralds a dramatic change of direction for Matthews, whose bawdy vocals on hits such as "Mulder and Scully" and "Road Rage", from Catatonia's 1997 album International Velvet, made her the toast of the Britpop scene. Here raucous guitars are replaced by acoustic shades of mandolin, banjo and fiddle. Matthews' vocals are instantly recognisable, but rather than belting them out, for the first time she seems to be really singing. The instant you hear Cockahoop, you wonder why she never made it before.

I guess I'd expected a loud mouth. In fact Matthews talks in husky, almost whispered tones. She's warm and kind and giggly, although it's clear that, still stung by past experience, she's deeply alarmed by interviews. Whenever the conversation veers into difficult territory, most notably the final years with Catatonia, she stares wide-eyed at her feet and digs holes in the ground with her fingers.

Along with her heavily accented vocals, Matthews was famed for living the rock star's life. She was the ultimate party girl – boisterous, beautiful and bursting with joie de vivre. Matthews' favourite T-shirt bore the words "fastrisinglagersoakedriproaringpoptart", and she had a habit of arriving on stage clutching a bottle of chardonnay. One of her more famous escapades involved going missing after a gig in Southampton and waking up the next day in the south of France.At the Hay Festival, she sang folk songs to Bill Clinton with her head resting on his chest.

But by the summer of 1999 things seemed to fall apart. Rumours began to circulate regarding Matthews' state of mind. Her alcohol intake was beginning to worry the rest of the band. In interviews she began to speak of "feeling like a hamster on a wheel". In the end the band pleaded nervous exhaustion and cut short their tour. Matthews fled to a friend's house in Los Angeles. The following year Catatonia recorded their last album, Paper Scissors Stone.

They called it a day in September 2001. Matthews won't be drawn into the details, she will allude only to "the time when I got confused". What made the band finally split?

"It was just wrong," she murmurs, picking at the grass. "I can't say anything more specific than that. It had been right all along, in the time and the place and the music that we were doing, but now it wasn't. I wanted to do something a lot more simple and intimate-sounding. I wanted to step away from the big chorus-driven songs. I just couldn't do it any more."

Matthews says it was on a "romantic whim" that she settled in Nashville. "Everyone's a musician here," she says, suddenly smiling again. "It's full of atmosphere. The whole place seems to be drenched in song." She came over to attend a songwriting convention with Graham Gouldman, formerly of 10cc, but then decided to stay and go on some road trips around Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas. Upon returning to Nashville she called Baxter and asked if he would help her make an album of acoustic folk songs. Baxter knew little about Catatonia although he had heard a demo of Matthews singing old folk tunes.

"Come to think about it, I don't know why the heck he let me come," she laughs. "I listened to the tape recently and it sounded dreadful. But I think he got the gist of what I wanted to do."

The singer's affection for country and folk music goes back to her early childhood. When she was nine she made her singing debut with "All My Trials", now the last song on Cockahoop. She was sitting in a tent in her parents' garden at the time, but when she emerged it was to a standing ovation from her friends and family.

"I wanted to follow my favourite tunes and see if there was any remnants of them played here," Matthews explains. "At the beginning of the last century musicians in the Appalachians swallowed a whole lot of Irish and Scottish tunes and that's how that fiddling thing came out of there. But a few Welsh ditties managed to creep over too. When we were in the studio, me and Bucky found we had a lot of tunes in common."

I suggest there must be a degree of fear attached to making an album under your own name after so long in a band. "When I first saw the promotional copy of the album, there was my name across the front. I thought it was a mistake. But then I didn't want to hide behind anything any more. In a way I was quite glad to have the sole responsibility of the sound of the album, for it to have one clear voice."

Interestingly, the opening track on the new album is "Chardonnay" a raucous love letter to her favourite drink. When I ask if there's any significance in the subject matter, she laughs nervously, blushes and then abruptly changes the subject.

She says she loves the anonymity of life in Nashville even though "people know I'm not from around here every time I open my mouth". She says leaving behind her celebrity status "has been beautiful. I don't miss any of the attention as I'm not good at handling it. I never adapted to it. It can be so overwhelming. I really love living a simple and normal life."

Nevertheless, she says: "I had a great time and I can't regret any of it. One of my favourite times was at the festivals just after 'Road Rage' came out and the whole crowd was singing the chorus along with me. I'll not forget that. But things change. Some day you have to find yourself with your feet on the ground and I've done that this year."

Matthews talks repeatedly of having got her life back to normal. When asked what is normal, she replies: "Going shopping, hanging in the countryside, seeing friends. Just everyday things that you don't get when you're constantly on tour. You know, I always wanted to get married and have a family but it never seemed the right time until now."

She giggles girlishly when I bring up her whirlwind romance with Riddle."Marriage is great. I feel more settled than I've ever felt in my whole life. I've got so many people around me now, really good people who support me musically and personally. I'm married, I've got a baby on the way and I've made an album I love. I would really be at fault if I let the ground fall away from me again. This time it has to be different."

'Cockahoop' is out on 16 May on WEA