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Cantrell, who has written a good portion of the material on her previous three albums, confined herself to cover versions, because she did not have the time or mental capacity to engage in the gruelling process of writing original songs.

She released Trains and Boats and Planes digitally to eliminate the high cost of manufacturing compact discs, with word of mouth, an announcement on her website and a single concert providing the only methods of promotion.

"I am at the point in my career where I can’t really operate in the traditional business model of yore. I felt like I couldn’t commit to a tour to promote the songs and that increased the risk of having unsold records," Cantrell says.

"It’s also a process of discovery, to just sell something digitally and see how that works," she adds.

The newly-recorded classics are given the usual Laura Cantrell treatment, which might not sound like praise, but is actually a good thing. Although her music is not groundbreaking or in any way dangerous, it is often beautiful. As with her three previous albu these songs abound with strong melodies, sung in a fragile honey-soaked voice.

The collection includes versions of Merle Haggard’s Silver Wings and Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. They are backed simply and gently by mandolin, accordian, violin and acoustic guitars that serve to showcase the strong, generally slow, vocal melodies of the songs.

The most fundamental reworking on the new release is reserved for Cantrell’s cover of New Order’s 1985 song Love Vigilantes, which transposes the original brash, post-punk anthem into a slow, sad, country ballad.

Cantrell see very much a product of her circutances, growing up in Nashville with her two lawyer parents and arriving in New York in 1985 at the age of 17 to study American literature at Columbia University.

She has remained in New York ever since, immersing herself in the city's alternative rock scene (she sang on a They Might Be Giants track) as she developed the country music of her Nashville roots. For several years she led an unlikely double life, managing a team of stock analysts at Bank of America by day and producing two highly-acclaimed albu by night, before finally leaving to pursue her music career full-time in 2003.

She now lives in Jackson Heights, a melting pot neighbourhood in the Queens borough of the city, with her husband, Jeremy Tepper, a member of World Famous Blue Jays, a former New York-based country rock band with a penchant for truck drivin' songs. Tepper now runs Diesel Only Records, a small Brooklyn-base record label devoted to country music, that has put out some of his wife's previous albu.

Although she sings with a slight twang, Cantrell somehow imbues what are essentially traditional country songs with the spirit of New York, producing a more modern and stylish sound that makes the music palatable to those big-city dwellers who like the idea of country but are put off by the rhinestones and cowboy hats.

As she performed the new material at the one-off show in New York on Wednesday, Cantrell, who has a porcelain prettiness, was dressed entirely in black, but for a white rose. She told the audience of mainly thirty and forty-something professionals that her album of cover versions had "got the gears moving again," after the period of inactivity following the birth of her daughter.

Cantrell recalls that "by the time we were mixing, my not-so-little baby was tearing apart the studio and things had started to feel right in the world again. Planes and boats and trains are passing by, and we’ll be flagging them down soon enough."

She plans to build on this momentum by writing some new songs with a view to recording another album, maybe next year. And she may perform in the UK later this year.

"I’m hoping we can put a trip together at some point. It won’t be 20 or 30 days out, like before, but I would be very happy to go back to the UK."

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