Monica Queen does not want for accolades.

The Glasgow singer-songwriter and Thrum frontwoman has been hailed as one of our greatest voices by Grant Lee Phillips (Grant Lee Buffalo) and Gary Lightbody (Snow Patrol) among others - and if widespread comparisons to Emmylou Harris have never been far off the mark, then the wag who once called her "Tammy Wynette with bollocks" was spot-on.

Queen first swaggered into our alt-pop consciousness as a guitar-thrashing indie darling in the early-mid 1990s, thanks to local rabble Thrum. She has since worked with Love and Money's James Grant, Shane MacGowan, and The Jayhawks' Mark Olson, with whom she shares a bill (along with a love of Neil Young and Gram Parsons) at Glasgow's Fallen Angels Club next week. Then there's the matter of Queen's appearance on one of the best Scottish pop songs of all-time - playing raucous, thrilling vocal foil to Stuart Murdoch's quiet man in Belle and Sebastian's Shangri-Las toting magnum opus, Lazy Line Painter Jane (1997).

Queen's career has charged across folk, pop, krautrock, electronica and rock 'n' roll, as a solo artist and in Thrum, but there have been some constants, too - not least her partner Johnny Smillie's vintage guitar lines, and the inherent country music that stole Queen's heart as a child. "My love of country goes back to being in the family home," she recalls. "My mum and dad would go out and I'd sneak into the room and put on their records, and as with most households, dare I say, the ones they had were Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette.

"I was always intrigued by those records, because I thought all the women on the front looked absolutely beautiful," she says. "They were just full of intrigue and mystery - you know, 'These beautiful-looking women are on a record; they're not tied to a sink!' - and then I'd get the record out of its sleeve, put it on, and their voices would hit me like a steam train. I think that by having that total love of these women singers, and the way they sang, it was very natural for me to interpret my own voice in a similar way."

Queen's other constant, is, of course, that incredible voice, which has graced two Thrum albums (1994's Rifferama, 2011's Elettrorama), two solo LPs (2002's Ten Sorrowful Mysteries, 2005's Return of the Sacred Heart), sundry EPs and collaborations - and there are more solo works on the horizon. When did she realise her lungs were a match for her beloved country belles of yore? "I suppose my rehearsal, in trying to express my own voice, and finding out that I had a voice, was singing along to those records really, really loudly," she says. "I got a real insight into the fact that I could actually follow their melodies, that I could sort of sing along with them. That was my training."

Since then, Snow Patrol have invited Queen to sing with them live, Grant Lee Phillips has long sung her praises (he proudly wore a Thrum t-shirt onstage at the first-ever T in the Park), and her charms were evidently not lost on Belle and Sebastian. How did her infamous duet with Stuart Murdoch on Lazy Line Painter Jane come about? "I'm never really sure of the timeline - I'm not even sure how we managed to make some kind of connection with them - but I do remember meeting Stuart in San Francisco," she recalls. "We were out there recording our first album, and Stuart was being a bit of a wanderer - looking for things, experiencing the big world out there, outside of Glasgow. We bumped into him at a show, and we kept in touch when we got back home, and he was starting up his own band by then. Then one day he phoned and asked if I'd come and help sing a song they were finding a wee bit tricky in the studio. It was Lazy Line Painter Jane."

It's one of Belle and Sebastian's best-loved songs, and an enduring, joyous beacon on the Scottish pop landscape. Was Queen aware of the spell it would cast at the time? "No, you never know these things,"

she offers. "You can never tell. You can have an idea as a songwriter that it's a good song, and you can like the melody, and the words, and you can enjoy performing it, but you never really know what kind of life it's going to have. Some songs take on a more meaningful form for people than others. And Lazy Line Painter Jane just seemed to capture the imagination of Belle and Sebastian fans, and a wider group of people. It's hung around for a long time now. It was such an unusual pairing."

Queen had pulled pop surprises before. It was unusual, in 1993, to switch on Channel 4's notorious youth brouhaha The Word (which hosted the likes of Oasis and Nirvana), only to discover Thrum on the telly.

"That was a pretty mad 24 hours," Queen recalls. "We got a phone call to say, 'We'd love you to come on the show, can you come today?' So they flew us down, and we went on The Word, and it was quite an electrifying experience, because it was all completely live, and it happened so fast, it was mad. I didn't have time to catch my breath,"

she says. She can still sing to the heavens without it.

Monica Queen supports Mark Olson (The Jayhawks) at The Fallen Angels Club, CCA Glasgow, on April 22