Buddy Miller is a country legend who has played with Alison Krauss and Steve Earle.

His wife, Julie Miller, is a singer-songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Dixie Chicks, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.

Together they live in Nashville in a house which sounds like a fairground for country music.

Richard Thompson was so taken with the couple’s home he decided to use it as his base to put together a new record after two albums made on the road.

“There are so many instruments – guitars, mandolins, cases, amps, heaven knows what – that between him and his wife it’s slightly chaotic,” explains Thompson, speaking from LA where he lives.

“The whole ground floor is a studio and upstairs there are two rooms where they live. It’s organised chaos, which contributes to the feeling of being relaxed.”

Thompson would pick up random guitars – an old Guild Excelsior with a hollow body he used to write the melody on the track Salford Sunday – and, if he liked the sounds, add some riffs to the tracks which ended up comprising the record he released on February 11.

He had previously described Electric as folk-funk – “Somewhere between Judy Collins and Bootsy Collins” – though now admits that was partly jest.

“Hmmm… It’s the way the band played the songs. It did come out rather funky and obviously folky. Perhaps it’s a whole new genre.”

His previous full-length, Dream Attic, was recorded on a two-week US tour from a set of demos.

“I thought it was going to be easier and cheaper. In the end it cost exactly the same and was difficult in other ways; one of the hardest things is you have to learn to play the whole album through in one go, seamlessly and without mistakes, which is a lot to ask without musicians who can go in and focus on one track at a time.”

Recording in someone’s house would solve that problem, though. So the drums and the mixing console were in the living room. He sang the vocals in the kitchen.

If the studio had a big influence, so did Miller’s friendship circle. Alison Krauss sings in the chorus of The Snow Goose.

“We had pretty much finished recording and I had to leave town and I thought everything was finished and there was a suggestion Alison should come in and add a harmony to it.

“I hadn’t thought of it and it sounded like a great idea so she dropped in and stuck it on and everyone loved it so it stayed.”

Krauss, who has won more Grammy awards than any woman in history, covered Thompson’s Dimming Of The Day on 2011’s Paper Airplane but had never met its author before.

She has called the song Thompson wrote for his ex-wife, Linda, one of the greatest songs for a woman to sing.

Krauss’s touring band for her Grammy-winning Raising Sand record included bluegrass virtuoso Stuart Duncan. He’s a man who finds the fiddle as easy as the mandolin, the guitar and the banjo. He has played with the Nashville Bluegrass Band since 1985 and won Grammys for fiddle playing.

Thompson calls him a great and he adds the fiddle to Electric.

The Nashville love-in continues with Miller’s engineer’s wife, Siobhan Mayer Kennedy.

“She sings harmony on a lot of the record. She is from Liverpool; she’s an Irish Liverpudlian. She was in a band called River City People in the ’80s.

“She now lives in Nashville and I thought her voice would be very suitable for harmonising. She has a bit more of a British accent than most people you find in Nashville.”

Thompson might live in LA but Electric is a thoroughly British record in sentiment (if not always in sound). It’s a reason Kennedy got the gig. There are break-ups and painful goodbyes; oodles of self-deprecation; thoughts on the financial crisis.

Tracks include Stuck On A Treadmill, Salford Sunday and Good Things Happen To Bad People.

Electric could be Thompson’s 40th album but he has long stopped counting.

He once commented that political songwriting was an option but over the years there has been one constant in his work: people.

“I think it’s an option sometimes and it’s an obligation other times. At times of political extreme if you are a songwriter then you should be writing political songs.

“I don’t think of that at this particular time, so I think there are things on the record you can take as political or personal relationship songs, one way or the other, but I think the themes are really much more about people.”

  • Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street, Friday, February 22. Starts 7.30pm, tickets £22.50 and £26. Call 01273 709709. Also playing at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, on March 7 at 7pm. Tickets £25 and £27. Call 01424 229111