You suspect that John Peel will probably get a song dedicated to him every time Laura Cantrell sets foot on a British stage — so effusively did the late DJ champion her music.

Unlike her last London show, however, she manages to get through the dedication without bursting into tears. Everything, once again, is as it should be in the world of Laura Cantrell. Weaned on a diet of Dolly Parton and Patsy Cline, the Nashville-raised Cantrell is one of those singers who strives (or rather, doesn’t) to let the songs tell their own story. There’s no grandstanding in the languorous delivery of Mountain Fern. On California Rose — a tribute to her aunt, the song collector Rose Maddox — her band locks into the song’s gentle groove, merely allowing it to pull them along.

And it’s all perfectly nice. She’s far too polite to ignore fans’ cries for requests, albeit to gently decline them. But over the course of an evening, it’s hard to suppress a hankering to see less of Cantrell the auburn-haired archivist and a little more of the passion that finally made her give up her high-ranking job as a New York bank manager two years ago.

The set-up tonight — purely acoustic — does little to help her at times. Stripped of the rockier arrangement on her new album, Humming by the Flowered Vine, the Lucinda Williams-penned Letters sounds oddly banal. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was always like this with Cantrell, but cock an ear to last year’s Live at Schubas’ album and it’s a different story. Electric pick-ups, Rickenbackers and clattering drums confer a kinetic quality upon Cantrell’s music that can’t fail to elicit a response.

Tonight, she has to look deeper within herself to achieve the same effect. When the moment comes, it comes via Early Years, her beautifully observed paean to the fleeting fearlessness of youth. Thereafter, what at times seems like a curatorial gathering starts to get convivial. She assumes the warmth of the narrator rather than the neutrality of the page. She even yields to a request — the relatively unknown curio Lee Harvey. Written by Homer Henderson in response to Pete Seeger’s pious He Was a Friend of Mine, Cantrell wears the song like a favorite pair of dungarees. And when the support singer Holly Williams joins her on stage for a rousing rendition of Gillian Welch’s Orphan Girl, audience and band are as one. You suspect that somewhere they’ll keep singing into the small hours, but here and now, the 11pm curfew yields to no one. Shame. She only just got going.