TEDDY Thompson "just sprung it on her" when he suggested the English folk and rock musician should work with Los Angeles singer/songwriter Kelly Jones.

"We'd met through mutual friends," says Teddy, ahead of the Anglo-American duo's gig on Saturday at Pocklington Arts Centre on their debut British tour.

"I was touring with k.d. lang, Kelly had friends in k.d.'s band, and I was playing at Club Largo [in LA] when I sprung it on her at about half an hour's notice. I picked a George Jones song, Window Above, for us."

The year was 2011, the harmonies blended and it seemed only natural to do more, as Teddy and Kelly affectionately came to call each other TT and KJ.

"The way it works is that Kelly lives in LA, I live in New York, and Kelly came up to New York and suggested we should write some songs together and should have a friend, Bill DeMain, from Nashville, write with us," recalls Teddy, the 40-year-old son of folk luminaries Richard and Linda Thompson.

So began their bi-coastal bursts of creativity, some songs being penned in summertime in a West Hollywood bungalow surrounded by palm trees and cactuses; others taking shape in autumn and winter in a Greenwich Village high-rise with a skyline view as they wrote of the joys and sorrows of love and the vagaries of the human heart.

"We had three writing sessions, two in New York, one in LA, where would write over ten days with gaps between sessions of several months, so it was the best of both worlds: a hotbox feeling when we were getting together and then months apart, and we just knew we were creative soulmates meant to work together," says Teddy.

The resulting album, Little Windows, was released this spring. "It's a very different style of writing from just writing your own songs when you can vomit on to the page and then clean it up a bit, and that makes for some really good songs, but this is different, and it's a way that many songs have been written, in collaboration, like in the heyday of the Brill Building in New York.

"What happens is that when you write together, a song tends to be more universal as it can't be esoteric, quirky or personal because, in our case, it's being checked by two other people and that definitely makes it more universal.

"It can be a difficult thing to open up to and accept as a songwriter because it can feel like criticism when you come up with something and someone else says, 'but what about this?'. It takes a while not to take it personally but the flipside is to be free enough and relaxed enough to express yourself when treading on someone's toes, so it's a really good exercise in artistic diplomacy."

Teddy Thompson with Kelly Jones, supported by Sunny Ozell, Pocklington Arts Centre, Saturday, 8pm. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk