Nashiville queen Gretchen Peters to headline Pocklington Platform Festival on Saturday

She will be performing her country and roots pearls, from last year's murder ballad Blackbirds and When All You Got Is A Hammer, back to The Secret Of Life, Independence Day and most beautiful of all, On A Bus To St Cloud, in her headline slot at Pocklington's Platform Festival at The Old Station on Saturday.

It will be her first North Yorkshire concert since March 2015 at Harrogate Royal Hall, a night when her introduction to Everything Falls Away prophetically heralded the piano seat suddenly giving away under Barry Walsh, her pianist for more than 25 years and now her husband for six. Barry took it in his stride, recovered and settled on a new seat.

"It was a good recovery, so you have to give him credit for that," recalls Gretchen. "But then he kicks them [piano stools] hard enough, so it's kind of karma for all that."

Inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2014, Gretchen has always written with uncanny nous for just the right domestic detail and with bittersweet maturity in her storytelling, and will be doing so again for her follow-up to 2015's Blackbirds. "I've only just started thinking about new songs, a new album, whatever. It takes a lot for me to introduce a new song into the live show," she says.

"I'm really secretive until I know where a song sits in terms of an album, but also with Blackbird and the previous album [2012's Hello Cruel World], the tours were heavily reliant on those records, but people are wanting to hear earlier songs too.

Gretchen Peters: "One of the qualities of a good song is that the songwriter keeps rediscovering it"

"That's good for us because one of the things we can do is that we're able to re-think the old songs with new arrangements on this year's tour, where it's fun to think of ways to do them."

Gretchen uses On A Bus To St Cloud as an example. "It has evolved so much over 20 years that I wanted to re-record it for the Essential collection, as one of the qualities of a good song is that the songwriter keeps rediscovering it," she says.

"After 20 years, I'm finding new things in that song that change the way I sing it. Especially the interplay between Barry and me over that time changes how we play it. The experiences we've had make it new each time."

Not every song bears up in that way, suggests Gretchen. "Being the writer, I know where the faultlines, all the time, and sometimes in the lifetime of a song after you're recorded it, the faultlines become deeper and unbearable or sometimes they disappear, like a fault in a marble surface becomes part of its beauty," she says.

"I've experienced this many times and that's why I think of writing not so much as self-expression but as self-discovery, finding things that at first I didn't know were there.

"One of the things that really strikes me when I have a young person in the audience, late teens or early 20s, is that I'm writing songs for mature people who've lived a lot, and I'm thinking, 'What are young people getting out of this?', but then I thought of listening to Joni Mitchell when I was younger and getting something out of it.

"A song belongs to the listener after a certain point - as a basic principle art doesn't belong to you after you've made it -and I really delight in what they find in a song when it's not always what it means to me."

Gretchen has experienced both sides of this equation as a singer, songwriter and interpreter of songs. "I've covered songs and had my songs covered, and first of all singers have to be willing to sing that song for the rest of their career and feel that they can bring something of themselves to it, but not their ego," she says.

"The best singing is a form of acting where you're really inhabiting that character, and if people believe you in that moment, it works better. The crux of it all to me is suspension of disbelief, when you're submerged into the charactrer of the singer or what you're singing about."

No doubt Gretchen's Essential collection will be at the heart of Saturday's set with her touring band.

Gretchen Peters: "The test was: does this song feel like an essential part of the story?"

When choosing songs for the retrospective, she "sought counsel from all the trusted people I know". "I always bounce things off people who understand me and I trust, but in the end I make the decisions, and it was hard because I had more songs than I had space for," Gretchen says.

"The test was: does this song feel like an essential part of the story?, and the one song that didn't make the album that was important to me was Idlewild, but if I'd included every song I liked from Hello Cruel World, it would have been just that album and a few other songs.

"The fact that I was able to have a second disc for rarities and demos helped ease the pain of making decisions as I could represent other aspects of my work that way."

Meanwhile, if you wish to keep up to date with Gretchen's creative progress, check out her website, gretchenpeters.com/. "I've been giving away a track once a month where you can peep behind the curtain and 'see how the sausage comes out'," she says.

Pocklington Platform Festival's Saturday running order at The Old Station: Platform 1, 1pm, Orphan Colours; 2.15pm, The Shires; 3.35pm, The Dunwells; 5.05pm, Seafret; 6.40pm, Danny & The Champions Of The World; 8.05pm, Badly Drawn Boy; 9.35pm, Gretchen Peters.

Platform 2: 12.40pm, Daisy Allen, 1.45pm, Empire; 3.05pm, Watching Planes; 4.25pm, Dan Webster & Amelia White; 5.55pm, Barcode Zebra; 7.30pm, Jake Morrell; 8.55pm, Wildflowers.

Charlie Daykin will present budding young musicians from York's Access To Music College on Platform 3, outdoors. The festival is run by Pocklington Arts Centre; box office, platformfestival.net, pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk or on 01759 301547.