ALTHOUGH you may recognise her music, you may not necessarily know her face. And that’s just the way Amy Macdonald likes it.

For the 29-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter who will be performing at Bournemouth Pavilion this Sunday, doesn’t seek out the media spotlight. She has no interest in being famous.

“I got into music because I just love music and that’s why I do what I do,” she explains. “I have no desire to see my name in lights. I just want to be able to play and hopefully people will still want to come and see me play.”

Amy says she doesn’t feel uncomfortable if she is talking about music.

“I think sometimes people talk nonsense in order to be in the spotlight but I think it should be music that is first and foremost - rather than all the tittle, tattle and gossip.”

The upside of her success though is that she has been able to indulge her passion for cars. She has not one, but two Ferraris at her home in Scotland.

“It’s always been a passion I’ve been able to follow but I never really spoke about it because I didn’t think anyone would be that interested, but after going on Top Gear it’s now the number one question people ask me!”

But although she’s upgraded her mode of transport, Amy says that success hasn’t changed her.

When she’s not on the road, she loves going back to her home town just outside Glasgow to be with her family, friends and dogs.

“ I do enjoy being close to my friends and family because that’s where I grew up. I still have the same friends I had at school and I live ten minutes away from all my best friends.

“I’ve got this crazy kind of life but that’s my job - my friends have always been there from the beginning.”

When we spoke earlier this week, Amy had only just arrived back in the UK after touring Europe.

“It exciting to get back to the UK. Hopefully it will be as promising and positive as it has been so far.

“I’m looking forward to playing in Bournemouth. I’ve been performed there several times - it’s a lovely part of the world.”

Amy clearly has a close bond with her band and says she doesn’t get nervous ahead of a show.

“I don’t really get nervous. I really enjoy what I do so I get excited more than anything because I love to be able to perform and I love being able to travel to different places and meet fans - it’s my favourite part of what I do.

“The band and I are very close. Some of them have been with me from the beginning so I’ve known some of my band mates for over ten years.

“We are very well rehearsed and we now have four albums worth of material so it has taken a lot of thought to get the set list right.

“Hopefully there is something for everyone.”

Amy says she isn’t from a particularly musical family, she taught herself to play guitar when she was about 15.

“I loved guitar music and I wanted to play along, so I taught myself to play along to all my favourite songs.

“It was then a natural progression to writing my own songs and then I answered an advert in NME when I was 17 and it went from there. I still have the same record contract.”

Although Amy is only 29, she also has a realistic view of the music industry.

“It is so fickle that you can never tell what the future holds so I’m just thrilled that I’m still here after ten years and have released my fourth album. I never expected to release one album - never mind four!”

One of the major musical influences on her life is Bruce Springsteen. Amy is renowned for her brilliant covers of songs like Dancing in the Dark, Born to Run and I’m On Fire.

“ I have always been a huge fan of people like Bruce Springsteen - I think he is one of the best.”

But Amy is that rare thing: the natural musician in whom a new song is never far away.

“I tend not to write about relationships as it’s done too often,” she explains. “I write about anything and everything - things that have happened to me or to my friends, or things that are going on the news. It can be anything really - something I’ve seen on the telly.

“I have quite an active imagination so even the most random things can inspire me.”

Looking back over the four years between the release of her third album, summer 2012’s Life In A Beautiful Light, and the completion of her upcoming fourth, Under Stars she considers the steps that led to the making of the record that is, frankly, her most rocking yet.

As perhaps the biggest young female Scottish solo artist in the world – not to mention a huge football fan – Amy was asked to raise the curtain on two sports events that brought the planet to Scotland.

She had hoped to have a bit of time out in between.

“That year I was asked to perform at the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. Then I was asked to sing at the opening of the Ryder Cup. It was never really quiet,” she admits.

Then, just to completely ruin her well-earned break from a career that had roared out of the traps with 2007’s three-million-selling debut This Is The Life, “I decided to start writing songs.”

But this time, Macdonald broke with tradition. Rather than write practically everything herself, as she had done on This Is The Life, A Curious Thing (2010) and Life In A Beautiful Light, she connected with the circle of musicians with whom she’d become fast friends in the ten years since she signed a record deal aged 19, bass player Jimmy Sims and his friend/her occasional acoustic guitarist Ben Parker.

The trio realised they’d hit immediately on a winning writing formula. Macdonald’s plans for “a really slow-paced” album-making process went out the window. Within less than a year, they had 17 or 18 songs.

“It’s a new lease of life after ten years,” she affirms. “Everybody involved is excited and invigorated again. It’s a fresh start, with fresh ideas.

“Everyone I played the songs to was just absolutely buzzing,” Amy continues. “And for me it was generally a much more enjoyable process because I didn’t feel as much pressure because I was doing it with other people. There are still songs on the album that I’ve written all on my own, but Jimmy, Ben and I just struck up such a close friendship and working relationship.”

In early 2016 Amy and her wingmen began recording in the unremarkable-but-inspiring surroundings of the Clapham studio of fellow Scot Cam Blackwood (George Ezra, Florence and the Machine). There were additional sessions in another unprepossessing corner of London, at the studios of production duo My Riot (London Grammar, Birdy).

Dream On was an early stand-out. A gung-ho, positive rocker which showcases the new power in her voice, it also speaks of the greater volume – in both senses – of Macdonald’s new music. From almost the minute it was written it staked its claim to be the first single from her fourth album. That feeling was underlined when she and her band road-tested it over the summer.

“I did a few festivals in France, Germany and Switzerland, and we put a few new songs in the set to see how they went down. And Dream On, we played it at one festival in Switzerland, and people were dancing, singing – which is completely opposite to the normal reaction when you say, ‘we’re gonna play something new!’” laughs this twentysomething touring veteran.

“And afterwards, the Swiss promoter, who put on my first show in a tiny club in 2007, came running back to the dressing room, and said: ‘That song Dream On is a massive hit. People out there were loving it.’ We thought, ‘we need to take this feedback on board…’”

Pegged for release at the top of the new year, Macdonald thinks the sentiment (“Living for the weekend, the drinks are on me…”) is especially good for a January single.

“It’s obviously quite bleak as people try get over the Christmas hangover, so it’s brilliant to have such an upbeat song for January,” she notes with typical irrepressible enthusiasm.

The mooted second single Automatic came together when the band, thinking they’d just mess around and feel for a creative connection, struck gold on the first day of writing with the hard-driving track. “Because Ben is so skilled on Pro-Tools, it almost sounded finished after the first day. We beefed it up a bit and added some more exciting electric guitars later,” she says, highlighting the cracking solo that was the contribution of guest guitarist Leo Abrahams, recently fêted for his work producing Regina Spektor’s critically acclaimed Remember Us To Life album.

As for the words – “Hitting the road is all that I got… Foot to the floor, I can’t take any more…” – “that was me just thinking about people constantly running away from problems – and also trying to think of who I wanted to sound like. And on that one I was thinking of the Bruce Springsteen, big American thing…”

Down By The Water is a horse of a different colour; simple blues that emerged seemingly out of nowhere one afternoon when “Jimmy and I were just sitting messing around. He came up with some really nice notes on the bass, and we just added to it. It was one of those songs where, when we were writing it, we didn’t think it was up to much. It just sounded a bit too simple, pared down, not really a big extravagant song.”

But in that simplicity was majesty. In the studio with My Riot, the legendary Juliet Roberts – she sang house classic Needin’ U with David Morales – recorded “amazing backing vocals, gospel-style. As soon as I heard Juliet’s vocals, I just felt that it completed this kind of lovely, downhome, swampy feeling.”

The punchy, crunchy title track is surely another chart contender.

“We wrote that as maybe an album opener, but it didn’t have a chorus. That’s the great thing Cam did with that song – he told me to get a hook for it, to make it big and powerful. The next day I came up with something in about two minutes, no kidding. And obviously I was convinced it was rubbish. But Cam loved it straight away.”

Under Stars is full of moments like that: honest, persuasive, instinctive songwriting built for summer festival or daytime radio singalongs. It’s also full of smart, incisive, inclusive lyrics that can’t help but reflect the times in which they were written. A young worldly wise Scotswoman, Macdonald found herself writing during a hinge in history.

“The album is not the slightest bit political,” she begins, “but it was written before, during and after the Scottish independence referendum. Being in Scotland at that time, you couldn’t escape it. And from a writer’s point of view it was amazingly inspiring, even tangentially. We were talking about the events all the time, and that comes came through in The Rise And Fall,” she says of one of the album’s most anthemic numbers.

“If I’m honest I was thinking about Frank Underwood, Kevin Spacey’s character in House Of Cards, when I was writing – I was obsessed with that show at the time!” she laughs again. Then, recording the song in London in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, real-world events couldn’t help but filter in again.

The rousing From The Ashes has a similar backstory. “It’s another song that sounds part of what’s being going on, but it was completely unintentional. That song was me writing a song I thought would be perfect for The Hunger Games. It’s a really, really bleak song but It ends in euphoria with chanting and the idea that everything is OK. That’s the song that ends the album, which in my mind is the place where it’s always meant to be.”

Under Stars is 29-years-young Amy Macdonald reaching in, reaching up and reaching out. Her famously rich voice is richer, more powerful still. Her renowned way with a melody is stronger, bolder, more impactful. Partnering with new collaborators has given her the power to dig even deeper. Allying herself with like-minded musical souls close to home has freed her to fly even higher.

“It’s crazy all the things that have happened,” she reflects. “The one thing I regret slightly is not taking it in more, especially with the first album. It just exploded in Europe; there was one country after another doing exceptionally well. But I just thought that’s what happens – you put an album out and bang, it does really well! Now I know that’s not the norm, and that was an exceptional thing. I wish I’d be more aware at the time of how amazing it was. But now I know how lucky I was then – and how even luckier I am to still be doing what I want to do ten years later.”

Although she has been around for ten years it feels as though Amy Macdonald has only just begun. Under Stars, but reaching for them, too. She might have been there, done that, but she’s now ready to do much, much more.