Many singers have been forced to contend with the odd grizzly reception, but as Tim Hughes discovers, none as hairy as that experienced by singer-songwriter Corinne West.

MANY an artist can recount tales of unwanted attention and strange nocturnal goings-on.

But few are as dramatic as that told by Californian singer-songwriter Corinne West.

While playing a festival in the wilds of British Columbia, in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, the nature-loving artist received a very unwanted guest.

“It was a grizzly bear!” she recalls. “We’d flown out to this really remote festival on a series of planes – each smaller than the one before – and we ended up in this cabin in the woods.

“I woke up in the middle of the night to find a huge bear trying to get through the back door. It was huge and terrifying!

“Fortunately the fiddle player was with me and we made lots of noise to scare it away. I was bashing pots and pans, and he was playing his fiddle!”

Fortunately, it seems, the bear wasn’t a fan, and he cleared off.

Such encounters with wildlife are nothing unusual to Corrine, who makes a habit of taking her gloriously sexy jazz-folk-soul music to some of the wildest spots on earth.

Currently making her way through a UK tour, which next Saturday takes her to the relatively tame surroundings of Didcot’s Cornerstone Arts Centre, she flies straight from the UK to Canada’s Yukon Territory.

After the success of her first two albums Bound for the Living and Second Sight, she recorded her third album The Promise not in her native California, or even in Nashville, where her sound engineer was based, but back in the wilderness of BC – in a cabin converted into a studio, on the shores of a lake outside the sleepy town of Harrison Hot Springs.

She admits the stunning setting brought the best out of her.

“Most music is recorded in a box, and even if it’s a nice box, it’s still a box,” she explains.

“So, the idea was to take the whole environment and place it in a beautiful location where musicians can come to and leave everything else behind them – whether it’s their appointments or their dry cleaning.

“It was so cool. And when not working we could sit on a deck, look at the lake and get to know each other,” she recalls.

It’s a stirring body of work, by turns haunting, gripping and moving – and all wrapped around Corinne’s distinctive smoky vocals.

Her music is a mix of blues, folk ballad and country. “It’s all over the board,” she laughs.

Corinne describes herself as an outdoors girl, keen on hiking and getting stuck into the best that mother nature can offer.

“I am at home in the wilderness,” she sighs.

And even though we lack the vast empty spaces of North America, she is already enjoying the charms of the English countryside. “In between tour dates I spend time out in the wild. It’s very beautiful and different to California. And the best thing about England is you don’t have any big scary wildlife. And certainly no bears!”.

Corinne West plays the Cornerstone Arts Centre in Didcot on Saturday. Call 01235 515144 for tickets.

The Promise is out now on the Make Records label.