SETH Lakeman links up with emerging harmony vocal trio Wildwood Kin for his eighth album, Ballads Of The Broken, an epic, soulful set of stripped-back songs, booked for September 16 release on Cooking Vinyl.

Continuing the Devon folk musician's vision for recording in inspiring locations – previous albums have been made in a church and a copper mine – the 11 tracks were cut live in the Great Hall of a Jacobean manor house.

The spiritual-sounding songs have a trance-like quality: they encompass evocative contemporary messages, yet have an ethereal quality as if they have been hanging in the air for centuries.

Producer Ethan Johns has let nothing impair the raw content, having agreed to produce the album after Lakeman sent him one roughly recorded song on his mobile phone. "The kind of record I like captures human performance," he says, after working previously with Paul McCartney, Tom Jones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Ryan Adams, Kings Of Leon, Ray LaMontagne, Laura Marling and The Staves.

Lakeman first met Wildwood Kin, Devonian sisters Emillie and Beth Key and their cousin Meghann Loney, at a charity gig, and now they accompany his fiddle, viola and strident electric tenor guitar and multi-instrumentalist Johns's electric guitar, mandolin and hurdy-gurdy.

Ballads Of The Broken Few has seven original numbers plus a cover of Anna Lee, the Laurelyn Dossett song from Levon Helm's Grammy-winning Dirt Farmer album, and Lakeman's take on the 19th century moralistic song Pulling Hard Against the Stream. In addition, he has revisited the Cecil Sharp House archive, featured in The Full English project, to re-work traditional broadsides The Stranger and The Willow Tree for an album available on CD, vinyl and digital formats.

Lakeman's Ballads Of The Broken Few 2016 Tour will run to 23 dates in November and December but none of them in Yorkshire alas.