"AM I doing an interview with you, Teddy?"

Nerina Pallot is at home in London this morning with her seven-year-old son Wolfgang who is needing her attention. Plus, she's not long back from playing gigs in Italy, is looking forward to an Easter weekend off, has rehearsals and then a tour lined up after that to promote her latest album, Stay Lucky, her sixth. It’s not so surprising that she has overlooked our conversation.

And anyway, I can hardly talk. Truth is, when Stay Lucky came out last October it rather passed me by. My loss. Because it may well be the best thing she's ever done. A record that's Sunday afternoon in sound, but with deep currents of emotion swirling around in there too.

In an album of highlights one track, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a song that pays tribute to and could easily take its place in the Great American song book (if its creator didn’t come from Jersey that is).

Pallot quite likes the latest album too. "It's the first time I've made a record that I haven't hated very soon after," she tells me in between chatting with her son.

"People think that's a mechanism of self-deprecation. It's not. If you ask anybody who makes creative work, everything always feels like a compromise. But, actually, with this one I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm not in the habit of listening to my own music because that would be just weird. But if I do listen to it I'm not horrified or embarrassed. That's certainly not the case with previous records that I want to pretend I never made.”

She’s touring it with part of the band who helped make it. “Obviously, there’s an orchestra, strings, brass on the record. I can’t tour that. I can’t afford to tour that. I would love to, but at my level I wouldn’t get the people on the stage. There wouldn’t be enough room.

“So, I’ve condensed it down to a trio. But it’s the core trio. I think it’s pretty faithful.”

The last time I chatted to Nerina Pallot back in 2006 she was almost a pop star. She was promoting a hit album Fires and a proper hit single (it made it into the top 20), Everybody's Gone to War, her reaction to the Iraq War.

Back then we sat on Clapham Common discussing depression, duodenal ulcers, and getting knocked off the Live and Kicking sofa by a member of Steps (Faye, if you must know).

But the truth is Pallot was never really pop star material. She didn't have the level of ambition required. Plus, she wrote her own songs and her heroes were Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She really wasn't fit for pop purpose.

And that's why over the years her career has been an up and down one; she's been picked up and dropped by record labels, co-written songs for pop stars (Kylie - the original, Australian one, not the Jenner-come-lately variety) and various X Factor contestants and made records she believed in and some she didn't.

Stay Lucky, thankfully, is one of the former. "I wasn't planning to make a record like this. I was chopping up old hip-hop loops and I thought I would make something quite programmed. But I just thought: 'Well, what am I listening to?'

“And I was listening to those Sunday afternoon records. I was listening to Minnie Riperton, loads of old jazz. And the guys I'm playing with are really amazing musicians, pretty young and coming out of that jazz soul scene which is coming back in London a bit, actually.

"So, it wasn't a conscious effort, but it just felt so good to play those kinds of songs as well as listening to them."

Pallot herself gave the best summary of the new album when she called it her "death and shagging record". When I bring the quote up she thinks back to when she was writing the songs.

"Wasn't 2016 a really weird year? I thought maybe it's because I'm getting old. But everyone I spoke to, from teenagers to people in their seventies, were saying: 'This is a very odd time to be alive.'

“And a lot of my friends were having extreme situations. I had some friends who got seriously ill, friends getting divorced. Lots of endings. I lost people close to me and then obviously we lost Bowie and George Michael. And music just became this refuge for me.

"Before, when things were happening in the world, I've always responded quite politically. But I didn't have the energy. When I say 'death and shagging' I remember at university we studied The Wasteland and the tutor said that what TS Eliot is really talking about is that when war happens and the s*** hits the fan people don't go to the street and get all animated. They are just so scared and resigned they just want to get drunk and shag."

Perseverance is the quality that seems the obvious one to attribute to Pallot. She has stuck at it down the years despite the setbacks. But that’s not quite how she sees it today.

"Well, it's just laziness," she says. "I make a good living. And I'm really not employable, so there's nothing else I can do."

Come on, Nerina. There haven't been times when it's felt like an uphill battle? "No, not really in the scheme of things. An uphill battle is when you’re working three minimum wage jobs and you're knackered. Whenever people talk about their struggle I think: 'F*** off.' Try living on a sink estate with two kids and somebody leaves you ..."

If anything, she says, things might be harder in the industry now than they were when she started back at the tail end of the 1990s.

"I think Spotify get 20,000 songs a day uploaded. It's mad. It's harder than ever and so many really great things don't break through."

And anyway, Pallot says, when she did have a measure of success it turned out not to be as rewarding as she'd hoped. "It didn't do what I thought it was going to do for me as a person. It wasn't a magic wand that would make me miraculously happy."

And so, what makes her happy? Making music, being a mum, and trying to be a better songwriter. Oh, and maybe, if she can make it work, becoming a writer, full stop.

"It's a double-edged sword, song writing. I've tried to do things that are political, but it's very hard to get right unless you're Leonard Cohen. And I'd rather be Leonard Cohen than Frank Turner.

"To write about the things I'm interested in and want to talk about I don't think it's music I want to do that in. I think it has to be in writing.”

In which case the great Brexit novel may have Pallot’s name on the cover.

"With writing I'm always holding up my heroes to aspire to,” she says. “As a song writer I always aspired to be Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, so I'm constantly coming up short. With writing I write something and then go back to it and think: 'Well, it's not like Donna Tartt or Raymond Carver.’ But I'm keeping going."

Persevering. She's good at that. And that's a form of success in itself, isn’t it?

"I suppose the end game is everybody wants to play arena tours and be Lady Gaga or whatever and I'm sure that would be nice. But I was thinking back the other day to when I was 18. Then I just wanted to move to London and lbe in the music business in some way, shape or form.

"So, if 18-year-old me saw 43-year-old me she'd be like: 'F****** hell, woman, you're winning."

Nerina Pallot plays the Liquid Room, Edinburgh on Tuesday. She is also appearing at the Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival in August. Stay Lucky is available on Idaho Records