"I'm supposed to be a folk singer. I'm not a f******* folk singer." The return of Beth Orton

Beth Orton in 2016 is 45, the married mother of two young children and a songwriter excited about making new music. Those two things are more than enough for her, it seems. "The stuff I had to let go of was all of the stuff I didn't really care about doing any more anyway. I can't have a wild social life. I don't really go out any more much. I'm quite insular. I spend time with my family and I spend time with my music. It's sort of whittled down to the things I love most."

The one-time "comedown queen" (the voice you listened to after a night out having it large as the parlance of the time might have had it) has reached her nesting years.

There was a time – when she was making her name with her early albums Trailer Park and Central Reservation, records that ache with love and grief, and guesting on other people's dance tracks – when Orton would tell interviewers druggy anecdotes about her days as a clubber. Back then, she was the go-to vocalist for the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Andrew Weatherall, Kieran Hebden and William Orbit who wanted to add a touch of indie ethereality to their electronic beats.

Now she is married to American indie songwriter Sam Amidon and records her tunes in garages and at the end of people's gardens (and, yes, OK, the odd studio too). Or puts poems to music, as is the case of one of the sweetest tracks on the new album, a spoken-word happy-sad sketch called Corduroy Legs, inspired by the sound her son Arthur's cord-covered legs make while he's running around. "That's the most adorable sound I've ever heard in my f****** life," she half-shouts and then imitates the sound: "Whoo, whoo, whoo."

Kidsticks is for the most part a rather lovely thing. Orton has worked on it with Andrew Hung of dance duo F*** Buttons (they don't bother with the asterisks themselves). Perhaps not surprisingly then, the album has an electronic buzz to it. "I didn't make a conscious decision at the beginning," she protests. "Going into a studio with Andrew set a course but there was no expectation in that. It just happened naturally.

"Once we were in the studio I felt very excited and I wanted to write to these electronic loops. I think I had reached a plateau of writing on guitar possibly and I needed to free myself up. And that's what this experience did."

The album title comes from a loop she decided sounded like kids playing with sticks. "That sums up the playful nature of the record," she reckons. And that's a good thing, she adds. Thinking back to her earlier days, she recalls it wasn't always so. "I did Trailer Park and Central Reservation and by the time I got to [third album] Daybreaker, it was three records in a row over a relatively short period of years. Everything became a bit of a chore.

"I think I've found a way to make what I do feel exciting and that's part of why I made the record the way I did.

"You have to pull the rug out from under your feet a little bit to have any kind of perspective. Having kids has done that as well. That is a whole new perspective."

Later she'll add that becoming a mother has given life a different depth. "It's like seeing things in 3D." In short, motherhood is immersive.

And maybe, she thinks, she's rediscovered the younger woman she once was along the way. At one point on the album she sings, "going to lay my cruelty down/All the ways I've hurt myself".

"That's a very literal one," she admits. "That was a last-minute line I just snuck in. I do see that I've been cruel to myself. I do see that there are ways I didn't protect who I really am.

"I've been tougher than maybe I needed to be. I had to be tough, but real strength comes in allowing the vulnerability to co-exist. At certain times I've tried to put too much front on because I was laying myself so bare. Trailer Park and Central Reservation are very, very raw records coming from a very raw and honest place.

"I think by Daybreaker I started to harden. And then I got into learning my craft and that was a kind of defence. I kind of dug down and fell off the radar a bit because that was a way of protecting myself and I think that was a really wise thing to do, looking back."

After the first flush of success began to sour, she rowed back, started taking guitar lessons from Bert Jansch no less. Began to learn her craft.

Yet the craft was presumed by everybody from the get-go. When she started she was boxed up as that craftiest of things, a folk singer and her tangents into electronica were labelled folktronica. I get the impression today that she didn't – doesn't – really approve.

"I'm supposed to be a folk singer. I'm not a f***ing folk singer. I picked up a guitar at 19. I have a great love of singer-songwriters and folk singers and stuff but I don't put myself up there in that canon."

Kidsticks doesn't feel anti-canonical to be honest. It feels like another thread in the Orton tapestry. But for her it stands out. If anything, Kidsticks is a beginner's record, she suggests. Playing with electronic loops felt like starting again. It allowed her to become "someone with nothing to prove but just to express what came up in the moment. That to me is liberation".

Music was never a background noise in Beth Orton's house. "It was f***ing blaring. I was brought up around proper f***ing loud music being played non-stop." One brother loved punk and hip hop, another chart music. Her mother loved classical. "We all loved music. It was like a religion. It was incredibly important. It was political. It was about – what side you are on? It was going out on marches for the miners. It was festivals in the park. It was going to see The Fall when I was 11, sneaking in.

"But at the same time it was my mum's life too. She worked in this arts centre in Norwich where I grew up. When I was eight we went to see Dougie MacLean play and her best friend fell in love with Dougie. Their whole love affair happened in our front room."

Yes, it's that Dougie MacLean. Dougie "Caledonia" MacLean. And I'm guessing the Jenny in question is his now his artist wife.

"The first song I ever wrote, Dougie played guitar to. When I was 11, I wrote a song to my mum and Dougie said, 'Well, I'll play the guitar,' so he played into this tape. And it was a folk song, so you know you could say there was a tradition of folk in a sense."

MacLean was a formative influence, it turns out. "He was like a father figure to me and we stayed very close with him for many years. I'm still in touch with him and his daughter came and stayed here the other day."

Dougie MacLean. Bert Jansch. All these Scottish influences, Beth. We can basically claim you. "You can if you want."

Perhaps it's inevitable that MacLean might have become a father figure as her own dad left when she was 11. Orton was 19 when her mother died and in the wake of that, Orton started chasing life. She went travelling, turned her hand to acting and then met William Orbit at a party. She was already a clubber when they met.

"I loved the KLF. I loved a lot of what was going on then. I loved Massive Attack. There was a lot of exciting music. It was around that moment that I started going clubbing and William was a part of that. He used to DJ and stuff.

"I wasn't like a huge fan of what he was necessarily into. Thought it was a bit too mainstream in some ways. And I was into hip hop. I was a little Salt 'n' Peppa girl. But I thought it was alright. And more than anything he decided that I could sing and he wanted me to work with him and he paid me to do it so I did. Which sounds mercenary but I needed the cash."

Orbit worked on her earliest musical recordings. And he helped teach her about song structure. Soon, though, she found her own voice.

What did music give her that she hadn't had before, I wonder? "I've always had a huge need to communicate. I can talk the hind legs off of a donkey.

"I love to communicate. I love to understand and be understood. And once I started realising I had a propensity or a talent for songwriting, it was a no-brainer. It just spilled forth. It just had to.

"It happened on the heels of my mum dying and I think it was conversations I might have had with her. I can't explain it other than it was a compulsion to communicate and write and it came with a melody. These feelings came with a melody."

Listening to Kidsticks it's clear that, all these years later, they still do.

Kidsticks by Beth Orton is out on Anti Records. She plays Saint Luke's, Glasgow on October 2