WE begin with the voice. On the page as it is on the record.

The first track on Nadine Khouri's new album The Salted Air starts with her singing unaccompanied, breathy and intimate, a warm whisper in your ear. For a naked minute it continues, conjuring up the ghosts of Hope Sandoval, PJ Harvey, even Lou Rhodes.

And then at the 60-second mark the music begins, swelling up as Khouri breaks from words into a rising wail, a muezzin for lovers perhaps, and a possible reminder of the singer's Lebanese origins.

Yes, the voice. It's the first and last thing you notice about The Salted Air, a dreamy, handsome, hushed album designed to be played in the blue hours of night, a thing of smoke and pearls and silvered mirrors and bruised hearts.

This morning, though, its owner is more worried about the fact that she's come home to find her boiler broken and her ceiling leaking. A day before she was catching a plane from Madrid. Now she's just waiting for the plumber to turn up.

Khouri has just returned from a week of live dates in Europe. In January she was onstage in Glasgow as part of Celtic Connections. Quite something for someone who has said in the past she was mortified to sing in front of people.

You wonder how the hush and intimacy of the album translates to the stage. "I think there are enough dynamics in the live version that it's not just super-hushed and slow and quiet the whole way through," she says.

On the phone Khouri is a mixture of chatty and politely evasive. There's a sense that she doesn't want to expose too much to the light. As a teenager she was into shoegaze bands. These days, she says, she admires Leonard Cohen and Swedish singer Stina Nordenstam, the former for his longevity, the latter for the fact that "she put out the records that she wanted and wasn't too interested in all the rest of it."

The Salted Air was produced by John Parish, best known for his collaborations with PJ Harvey, and marks something of a return for Khouri. In 2010 she released an EP, A Song to the City, but she found the whole process so frustrating that she was ready to walk away from music.

Things changed when she spent a summer in Lebanon. "At the time I don't think I was planning on making any more music but I had this melody and imagery all summer long so I wrote it down."

That became the title track of the album. Other songs followed. "I just started to feel I had another idea of how I wanted to write music and what I wanted to do if I was to record another album."

Why had she been tempted to give up? "I think I was just frustrated with the whole process. Obviously I loved music. The industry bit I found a bit draining. But these songs started coming to me."

She began to think there was a different way to write and record. "I was more interested in capturing a mood or a feeling rather than a confessional song or a literal story. I think I had always been interested in that but I don't think I had quite done it before."

The album's Eastern influence is subtle and understated. "If anything it's subconscious. It's just what we can use to create the colours that we want," Khouri suggests.

Are these songs pages from your diary, Nadine, or are you telling stories? "I think it's a strange combination of both. I was reading a lot and watching a lot of movies. My own life and whatever I was into was merging into this stream."

The last line of the album, on the song Catapult, sticks in the head. "I became a woman the day I let you go," Khouri sings. Is this her feminist statement? "No. I wouldn't be particularly feminist. It was actually inspired by a novel I read, The Ice Palace, a coming of age story by a Norwegian novelist [Tarjei Vesaas]. It's about the process of losing something and transforming as a result. Growing up, perhaps."

Khouri's own growing up was done in Lebanon, London and New York. She was born in the 1980s (she's coy about the exact date) and lived in Beirut until she was nine, when the city was in the midst of civil war. And yet her childhood she says was hugely happy. "It's a really surreal way to grow up. It wasn't safe to be there at that point. We moved away thinking we would go back but the war dragged on."

London was inevitably a culture shock. "It was just so wildly different and I didn't have any reference points. The only thing I knew was Hamley's was a huge toy store. And unlimited television. That was exciting."

But the sense of displacement was strong. Music was the way she found her feet in her new home. "I think the first time I ever went to a music shop was with my father and he bought a couple of albums. It was stuff he loves like The Beatles and Elvis and the Kinks. Classic sixties rock stuff. That was the stuff that was played at home and that had a huge impression on me. When I heard Elvis it was love at first listen."

She began writing her own songs as a teenager, "terrible songs, angsty, existential songs," decamped to the United States and started playing solo gigs to a handful of people in CBGB in Manhattan's East Village.

When did she first feel confident in herself as a musician and performer? "It's hard to say. I think it's always a work in progress. I think maybe with this album I thought I was getting closer."

She was always a huge fan of Parish's and was delighted to be asked to sing on one of his tracks. When it finally came out he asked her if she was working on anything and serendipitously she had been working on the demos for The Salted Air. He came on board as producer. "He left us a lot of space and just made it sound a lot better, capturing the sound and getting things in the right place.

"I didn't overproduce the record. I didn't overthink it. I went in and did it live and it was done very quickly. I think John's a big fan of getting it done and moving onto the next project."

Khouri's next project is not quite on the cards yet. She has an album to promote. But chances are there will be one now. Nadine Khouri has found her voice.

The Salted Air is out now on One Flash Records.