James Morrison has done a lot of growing up in the past two years. Morrison, the product of a broken home, has had to deal with the aftermath of a rags-to-riches success story that saw him top the charts with his debut album and win a prestigious Brit award.

Now the singer, who turned 24 this month, is preparing himself for two major events. The first is the release of his second album, a follow-up to 2006's Undiscovered. The second is the arrival of his first child, which, like the new album, is due at the end of next month.

James Morrison: Getting ready for a new album and a new baby

'So much has happened since Undiscovered that I still find it hard to take in,' he says. 'I was very much a young lad when my first album came out. I feel as if I'm a man now.

'I'm getting ready to be a father, which is the biggest thing that's ever happened to me. I'm very excited by it, but it also makes it easier to get on with other things. It's not just about me any more.

'If my music career stopped tomorrow, I'd still be happy with my life. I don't feel I have anything to prove. If people keep buying my records, I'll keep on making music.' 

Chatting over tea and croissants in a Hammersmith pub, James is remarkably down-to-earth. The Springsteen-esque curls that he sported on the cover of Undiscovered have given way to a shorter hairstyle that makes him look rather like another well-known British singer.

'I get the Chris Martin thing all the time,' he sighs. 'I was walking through Victoria Station when a woman came up and asked me whether I was "that singer, the one out of Coldplay". I had to tell her that I wasn't him. I didn't tell her that I was James Morrison, though.'

When he finally stepped off the promotional treadmill that had seen him sell two million copies of Undiscovered, score huge hits with You Give Me Something and Wonderful World and win a Brit as best British male, James felt the need to restore a little normality.

The singer songwriter was born in Rugby

Before he began writing songs again, he went on a low key UK camping holiday with his sister, Hayley, and younger brother, Laurie.

He says: 'I wanted to do something totally ordinary. I wanted to feel like my old self again. I think of James Morrison, the singer, as someone separate. I sometimes don't believe that all this is happening to me, so I have to step outside it all.

'It was gratifying to slow down and take it all in.' Morrison's new album, rather grandly titled Songs For You, Truths For Me, is a subtle step forward from Undiscovered.

His rasping, bluesy vocals have lost none of their distinctive edge, but his songs are more varied this time around, relying less on traditional soul styles and more on a poppier, piano-based feel.

The Motown pastiches have gone, but the overall production is still lavish. 'I tried some new angles,' he admits. 'I tried to be more funky, but that didn't really work, so I went back to the approach I took on the first album, which was simply to write songs that I was proud of. I've been thinking more deeply about things, and that should come across in the songs.'

'James is remarkably down to earth'

The hardships of a tough, itinerant childhood have given Morrison a sensible perspective on pop fame. Born in Rugby, his parents, Paul, and Susan, split up when James was four, leaving Susan to raise him and his two siblings as a single parent. Constantly on the move, the family lived in Northampton for six years before settling in Porth, Cornwall, when James was 14.

'My mum and dad were better off apart,' he says. 'It would have been worse had they stayed together  -  they were always arguing. I still got to see my dad, but I also remember missing him.

'It was hard, but we looked out for one another as best we could. I had to grow up quickly. I was ironing my own clothes by the age of seven. I cooked my own meals and tidied the house.

'My mum was basically a hippy. She was very creative and used to sing in bands, so there were always musicians coming over to the house to play.

'There were some good times, but there were also bad times, mainly because we never had any money. My mum was a single parent and that took its toll on her. She'd often get stressed and she wasn't always in the best of moods. But, as kids, we just had to cope as best we could. As long as we had food on the table, we just got on with it.'

James puts his husky voice down to a bout of whooping cough that almost killed him as a child. 

'I was in an incubator for six months,' he says. 'I'd been a premature baby, and I'm told that I nearly died four times. I'd been coughing so much that I stopped breathing.

'Later on, I realised I had a very raspy voice, because other kids at school were always teasing me about it.'

It was when the family moved to Cornwall that Morrison first developed an avid interest in music, busking with friends in Newquay, holding impromptu jam sessions on the beach and singing with a short-lived covers band, the awfully named Peppermint Slug, while still at school.

When he was 16, James also met his long-term girlfriend (and soon-to-be-mother of his first child), Gill, who had originally moved into his mother's house as a lodger.

Four years later, in 2004, the young couple moved back to Gill's home town of Derby, where  -  after a number of false starts and a series of dead-end jobs  -  Morrison's pop career finally got off the ground.

A demo tape, made with local guitarist Kevin Andrews, found its way to major label Polydor and a record deal was offered almost immediately.

'Other than my family, Gill is the only person I've ever loved,' says James. 'She's also been there since the beginning of all this. But I hated living in Derby and was ready to go back to my mum's house in Cornwall when, out of the blue, I found myself with a record deal.'

Having emerged alongside Paolo Nutini, James Blunt and a deluge of other home-grown, male singer-songwriters, Morrison is keener than ever to establish his own identity.

But while he has also been touring the U.S.  -  most recently with the singer-guitarist John Mayer  -  he remains a quintessentially British, very unassuming kind of star.

'American artists are incredibly strong-willed,' he says. 'My attitude is different. I do my best and I try to do it with feeling, but I like being slightly unsure of myself, too. That's what drives me.'

• James Morrison's new single, You Make It Real, is out on Polydor on September 22. The album, Songs For You, Truths For Me, follows on September 29.

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