"I recorded it at an old, abandoned dog-food factory," Dosen recounts. "It was terribly, terribly haunted; a bunch of people had been buried in the silos when they were building the place. There were ghosts in all the rooms, things flying off the walls, we heard weird voices and noises on some of the tracks. So everyone said: 'Why don't you start singing your songs to the ghosts and calm them down?'

Dosen admits it sounds strange - "I know it sounds completely wacky" - but, you get the feeling that strange is her way. "I'm kind of a random person: I follow little white rabbits down holes," she says. "I let the thing be what it is. I let things grow. I'm very much a gardener, I'm not a builder. I don't construct things, I just sow seeds and let things grow, out of my control."

Such strangeness befits someone who grew up on a peacock farm in rural Wisconsin. After "learning to sing by aping Olivia Newton-John," a six-year-old Dosen started writing songs, on a plastic Shaun Cassidy guitar, "for the swans in the pond".