"I'm not going to try to convince myself it was practical," says Michelle Shocked. "But you can't stop creative momentum. When it hits, you've got to roll with it."

Newly returned from the desert of messy divorce and even messier label disputes, the veteran Texan songwriter, who says she has always "tended to think in trilogies, tryptichs or trios", has just released three albums in one go.

A concept-based trilogy recorded simultaneously over Christmas, Threesome couldn't be more different to Shocked's 1988 classic Short Sharp Shocked.

That was a bold, economical statement of intent, embedding sharp social commentary in simple, sturdy folk songs. This is an unfocused foray into everything from swaggering R'n'B to late-night jazz, which is content to deliver its missives in Spanglish or via the rhymes of Walt Disney.

But despite all this, her fans shouldn't be surprised. As always, Shocked is simply doing what she damn well chooses. "I'm sick of people telling me things can't be done," she explains, "when, in fact, I just need to figure out how to do it my way."

Born Michelle Johnston to a Mormon fundamentalist mother, Shocked rebelled against her regimented childhood by becoming a mohicaned punk and an activist in New York's squatter's movement.

The cover to Short Sharp Shocked shows her violent arrest during a protest at 1984's Democratic National Convention and for a time she was even committed to a psychiatric hospital, her mother only relenting, legend has it, when the insurance ran out.

But it was while volunteering at the Kerrville Folk Festival that Shocked really made her mark, so impressing producer Pete Lawrence with her fireside playing that he surreptitiously recorded her on his walkman.

Surfacing later that year as The Texas Campfire Tapes, the recordings went on to become a surprise hit in England, topping the independent charts. Along with Suzanne Vega, Shocked became the vital post-feminist presence in the Eighties folk revival.

After embarking on a stylistic pilgrimage which took in big band jazz, blues and gospel, Shocked spent much of the Nineties wrestling with Mercury for control of her backcatalogue, last surfacing with 2002's fairly underwhelming Deep Natural.

Kicking off her new tour in Brighton tonight, she now has three thoroughly likeable albums to play for. But it's almost impossible to square the woman of part one - a witty, country-rock break-up album, with the woman who, on part three, breathes dreamy sophistication into songs from Disney films.

"People have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner," says Shocked. "I have a lot of contradictions."