Having licked electric and acoustic guitar many moons ago, and staked a palpable claim as the only nyckelharpa player in the room (thanks to his Yorkston/Thorne/Khan trio), James Yorkston has now made the move to piano. The shift from strings to keys has unlocked new songwriting territory for many artists, from PJ Harvey to Beth Orton. For Yorkston, it ultimately led to this new vocal collaboration with Cardigans frontwoman Nina Persson, whose pure pop vocals entwine beautifully with Yorkston’s woebegone folk tones on the winsome ‘An Upturned Crab’ or make light weather of the wry and diabolic folk yarn ‘Sam And Jeanie McGregor’.

Ironically, the one consistent element in this new collection is the entirely extempore backing of his previous collaborators and Persson’s fellow Swedes, The Second Hand Orchestra, none of whom had heard the songs before Yorkston ran through them in the studio. 

Their improvised contributions can be as simple and effective as the mournful flutter of flute on ‘Keeping Up With The Grandchildren, Yeah’ or the lo-fi strings on the Ray Davies-like reminiscence of ‘Peter Paulo Van Der Heyden’. Elsewhere, the massed band chime on ‘Hold Out For Love’ while a slightly dissonant, insistent chord and peppy rhythm inspires a ramshackle collage of pizzicato strings and free-jazz trumpet trills on ‘The Heavy Lyric Police’.

Yorkston shifts seamlessly from droll humour to quiet desolation to tender contemplation, never more so than on ‘A Sweetness In You’, his requiem for Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison. There, he ponders how to broach the subject of death with his kids using a nursery rhyme simplicity: ‘I think of him often as I look out to the sea . . . and I live by the coast’. On an excellent album, he saves the best for the closing Nick Drake-like sultry jazz-folk of ‘A Hollow Skeleton Lifts A Heavy Wing’. 

The Great White Sea Eagle comes out on Friday 13 January on Domino Records.