JESSIE Ware has had an interesting year, she says, one where she became engaged and had “all these new experiences”.

Those experiences, however, largely can wait to be converted into song because, at 30, English soul singer Jessie is still hooked on unrequited love, or Tough Love, just as she was on her low-key but ultra successful, Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Devotion, in 2012.

Taking a brace of 2013 BRIT nominations for breakthrough act and British female in her stride, Jessie has seamlessly and gracefully negotiated her passage through the traditionally difficult second album. Any difficulties are confined to the relationships and feelings she describes.

“I still wanted to return to that theme from the first record of unrequited love,” Jessie explains. “I was drawing on a lot of past experiences, cleansing myself of those demons. I’m trying to get this all out before I’m going to be a happily-married woman.”

The signature song is the opening track, Tough Love, a sore love song written last May when Jessie took a breather in New York, completely devoid of energy after her touring exertions. It is a mature love song, one caught between initial magnetism and ultimate heartbreak, which is what divides Jessie from perky pop princesses. Elsewhere in today’s What’s On, American songwriter Mary Gauthier talks of pop music covering the first 90 days of love, or in reality lust, and the older writer taking care of the rest.

Jessie has a few of those lustful moments, notably on the closing Desire, but the stand-out tracks deal with more complex feelings, most notably on Keep On Lying and Say You Love Me, the number that stole a recent edition of Later...with Jools Holland.

If you were to hand these songs to ululating, auto-tuning Americans, they would be ruined, but Jessie Ware is the real deal, the hard yet soft Ware, understated but not Sade-smooth.

While you wish her the very happiest of marriages, hopefully it will not be to the detriment of her bittersweet songwriting.