Not many records manage to successfully touch base with a dead poet, a former soap actress and the ghost of a "mad, wild love", but then Fionn Regan's new album, 100 Acres of Sycamore, is far from ordinary.

A beautiful, burnished, decidedly autumnal suite of string-soaked acoustic songs, it vividly poeticises the arc of an epic love affair. The penultimate track, Vodka Sorrow, may give some clue to how it all ends, but getting to that point makes for a thrilling, darkly romantic ride.

The back story is equally intriguing. Much of Regan’s third album was written at Anna Friel’s house in Spain after the British actress and the 30-year-old Irish singer-songwriter met at a music festival in 2010. She invited him to stay at her home in Deià, Majorca, the town in which Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess, his seminal essay on poetry and myth-making first published in 1948.

“Anna and I got on instantly, the stars aligned, and we talked about this book The White Goddess that I’d known growing up,” says Regan. “It was written in Deià, where she lives, so she invited me to go out there. I was in the middle of writing anyway, and when I got there it sparked another writing jaunt. It’s an amazing place, and I think there’s an echo of the atmosphere in the songs. There’s a sense of magic realism about the place and there are flashes of that on the record.”

Regan first came to our attention in 2006 with his debut album, The End of History, a literate, light-fingered exercise in idiosyncratic acoustic songcraft, the emotional climate alternating between verdant and frostbitten. It was nominated for a Mercury Music prize and critically lauded, but what came next wasn’t part of the script.

Having signed with US record label Lost Highway, Regan set about making an album with Ethan Johns, the celebrated producer who has recently worked with Laura Marling, Ryan Adams and Ray LaMontagne. The record they created has never been released.

“To put it bluntly if you take the cash you have to be prepared to dance,” says Regan. “That’s the way it goes, and sometimes everybody has a different idea of what the dance is. In this case, the idea I had was quite radical compared to how they thought it was going to be. The record had a real punk spirit to it, it was pretty uncompromising to say the least, so it got clamped and they stuck the red tape around it. I could have hung around and got the nose job that was required, but maybe it’s the bumps in your nose that make you resonate for the long haul. It was a difficult period, no two ways about it, but what are you going to do? You get up off the canvas and you swing again.”

He didn’t land his next punch until 2010 with The Shadow of an Empire, a record he describes as being “made on the edge of a cliff”. It was a deliberately disorientated tumble of words and electricity: loud, ragged and often a little unhinged, and not everyone was convinced he was putting his best foot forward. Regan almost agrees. “I’ve only ever been able to represent how I’m feeling at the time, it’s like a tightrope walk in heavy winds,” he says. “I can’t churn stuff out, like The End of History Parts 1, 2 and 3. Everything is a reaction to the thing that happened before. Shadow split opinion, but that record was necessary for this record to happen.”

In which case we should be thankful, because 100 Acres of Sycamore is a masterful record which sets Regan firmly back on course. He recognised he was working on something special as soon as the first song, the title track, arrived. “Writing these songs felt like discovering something, they seemed to resonate with the ground I was walking on,” he says. “Everything just came together: the writing was pretty fast, and we recorded it in seven days. The bit that took its time was trying to work out all the musical parts and what song would flow into the next one. It was like a theatre rehearsal in your own head without a cast.”

This is how Regan tends to talk, circling around the subject in unusual, ambitious similes. In conversation he often chooses to take the scenic route and in his songs, too, he prefers to leave space for mystery, likening the process to “a magic trick”.

‘The thing about songs is that you never really want to unravel what they are,” he says. “It’s liquid gold, it’s fluid, and it just seems to land a certain way. Every time I’ve tried to actively go after something, the head department takes over and it doesn’t go anywhere, because when there’s too much head department all the other departments close down.”

Regan is at pains to point out that the album is very far from a work of plain-spoken autobiography – “things never really happen the way it appears, it’s a realm of different fragments” – but he does acknowledge that 100 Acres of Sycamore is a concept album of sorts. Certainly, if you listen carefully you can hear the sound of a heart being well and truly bashed about.

According to Regan it’s an “epic love story that spans time. I’ve heard people saying it’s a song cycle. I’d never really thought of that before, but I suppose in a way it probably is. Someone said it’s a record made for a film that doesn’t exist, and I can see that. You could make a movie for this record.”

Although his career has undoubtedly lost momentum following his time consuming industry travails, Regan harbours few regrets. “That’s the reality of a certain artistic journey,” he says. “My creative freedom is the thing that elevates my spirit the most, and with that you have to accept that there will be peaks and troughs and you will send people running for the hills at some point. It doesn’t make life any easier, but if it was a lie you were living, well, that would be really hard. In the end, the strength of the work is what prevails. It’s a commitment that you make for the long haul.” In that respect Regan has surely succeeded. 100 Acres of Sycamore is an album for the ages.

Fionn Regan plays Oran Mor, Glasgow, on November 30. 100 Acres of Sycamore is out now on Heavenly.