"Making my new album felt like skydiving"

Katie Melua, multi-million selling protégée of singer-songwriter, novelty pop wizard and Womble-in-chief Mike Batt, has just made an album with William Orbit, the ambient techno boffin who reinventead Madonna (on Ray of Light) and Blur (13).

It is a potentially intriguing juxtaposition, as if Britain's easy-listening sweetheart suddenly veered from the middle of the road to shoot off into hyperspace. "The whole thing has been really exciting," says Melua. "It was the same feeling I had the first time I went skydiving. I was really quite nervous, but I knew all I had to do was let myself go and it was going to feel amazing."

In fact, Melua fans need not panic. Her album, The House, represents a genuine artistic development, not a radical departure.

Liberated from the slight cheesiness of her mentor's jazz-pop tendencies, Melua has found her own poetic voice as a songwriter. Time-switching debut single The Flood (releasing on Monday) is a revelation, a stately, atmospheric ballad of existential questioning that shifts into a pulsing groove declaring philosophical liberation. It is, by some considerable distance, the best thing she has done. Yet Batt's old-fashioned virtues of clarity, melodiousness and craftsmanship remain, subtly updated by the shimmering modernity of Orbit's sympathetic production.

‘Inspired by the future'

"I wasn't trying to get away from anything," says Melua. "It was more about going towards something. I wanted the music to be inspired by the future, something unknown that's never been heard before, but at the same time hold on to the values of the music of the past, to try and tap into something that's so ancient and old that it's kind of forgotten. I thought that, if we went far enough in both directions, we could end up in the same place."

After nearly a decade as one of the biggest-selling female artists in the UK, Melua is still only 25. Her musical aptitude led to her attending the Brits School of Performing Arts in Croydon, where she was talent-spotted by Batt.

In 2007, she revealed that her third album with Batt would be their last together, and she seemed eager to exercise creative control. In a sense, Melua's fourth album might be considered her solo debut, although she makes no such claims. Batt remains on board as her manager, executive producer and label boss.

"Mike has been the rock on which I have established my musical identity. I've always been very open and unspecific about what kind of music I want to make."

Melua admits her first forays into writing and recording without Batt were not particularly satisfying. "I did go through a phase of reading a lot of poetry and getting heavily into philosophy and ended up writing things that weren't really in a musical format, which I put to some very electronic-based backing. I was also screaming it quite loud. It was appalling, I would not wish that on anyone. I kind of feel the most natural when I'm not getting in the way of the music and I'm not trying too hard."

If, in the end, The House is not such a radical departure, it may be because Melua is an innately sensible and even cautious character, who has used her years as Batt's protegee as an apprenticeship in performance and songcraft. "Because of things like The X Factor and Autotune, the real art of communicating a song is not treasured any more. But singing other people's songs can be an intensely personal experience. I want the songs to be vessels that people fill with their own imagination, the same way that I fill it with my thoughts and feelings."

Intensely private

Despite the openness and candour Melua displays in person, there is an intensely private aspect to her. She admits to having been bruised early on in her career, when her Brit school romance with Luke Pritchard of indie rockers the Kooks became tabloid fodder. More recently, there has been speculation about her close relationship with a photographer, Lara Bloom.

"First of all, I can tell you that I'm single, which is not lovely, but it is what it is. I don't think whether you are gay or not is the whole identity of a person.

"We live in the 21st century: questions of sexuality are not outdated, but I don't think the lines are very clear and they are not always clear to me. I really want the songs to speak for themselves and not to be associated with a story about me."

Indeed, the title track of her album makes the cultivation of mystery specific. "If this album is about something, it's the puzzle of being alive, the mind maze of going inside your head and trying to figure out what the hell is going on in there."

She may have already sold more than 10 million albums, but, in an artistic sense, it is as if Katie Melua just got interesting, revealing herself as an intriguing young singer-songwriter, making music that blends the old-fashioned and the modern on a voyage of self-discovery.