Listen to Laura Cantrell

What do you do if you’re a highly-acclaimed female singer-songwriter, who loves her work but has relatively modest sales, and a baby comes along?

Laura Cantrell, who gained instant credibility in 2000 when John Peel described her debut album as "my favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life", has come up with a solution: record a collection of cover versions and sell it over the internet.

Overjoyed as she was at becoming a mother, the American country singer found herself severely constrained by the responsibilities that arrived with her daughter, Bella, two years ago and sucked up her time, energy and focus.

"I hadn’t realised that a baby would have quite such a huge impact on my life and it confined me in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. I had travelled around so much, to England, Scotland, Ireland and across the US playing music. Now the only travelling I did was walking my floors with an infant," Cantrell, 40, said in an interview with Times Online.

"As I struggled to get some perspective on life as a new mum, I couldn’t help but feel some days that those hectic jaunts up and down the M and A roads, subsisting on coffee and 85p sandwiches were a thing of the permanent past."

She missed staying with friends while on tour, often in cities like Dublin and Glasgow, as John Peel's backing had made the British Isles her biggest market outside America.

And she became increasingly drawn to songs about travel, which took on a new meaning as a whole fleet of them seeped into her sub-conscious.

The lines: "Trains and boats and planes are passing by/They mean a trip to Paris or Rome/To someone else but not for me," that open Burt Bacharach’s 1965 song Trains and Boats and Planes particularly resonated with Cantrell, who begins her new collection with her version of the track that was originally recorded by Dionne Warwick.

"The words struck me in a different way and it became the starting point for the whole record," Cantrell says.

"We decided to record what we had been playing for fun and once we got going the travelling theme made a lot of sense since I wasn’t able to do it anymore."

What emerged was a collection of cover versions of songs all linked in some way to travel as Cantrell sought to use their music and lyrics to plug the gap in her life. They were released on Tuesday under the name Trains and Boats and Planes and are only available as an internet download.

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