Beth Orton's new album is so full of broken hearts and bitter ends you'd think the lanky British singer would have given up on falling in love at this point.

"I don't know that I've had bad luck in love," Orton, 31, said. "I think I've experienced some brilliant love, I just think that I have high expectations." Those lofty aspirations color all kinds of mad, bad and sad love on the folktronica chanteuse's recently released third album, Daybreaker.

The LP bears her signature mix of dusky folk arrangements imbued with everything from full string sections and bossa nova horns to electronic beatscapes courtesy of frequent collaborators the Chemical Brothers, with a fresh twist of Americana courtesy of such new friends as Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris.

When you live your songs and your songs live you, as Orton put it, it's hard not to feel like your life is just a step on the way to becoming your art. Orton, whose speaking voice is more girlish and playful than the breathy, fragile one of her albums, said she's not into "experimenting" with the people she meets. "I think that's a dangerous road to go down," she said. "True songs come from true life's experience, not from orchestrating situations that will breed inspiration."

That inspiration seems to come from everywhere these days for Orton, who said she can often be found staring up into the sky while singing. The intimate connection she feels between emotion and landscape finds her sitting on a train looking out the window ("Paris Train"), staring at the horizon ("Mount Washington") and worrying about the sky falling down on her head ("Concrete Sky").

On the latter, she collaborates with singer/songwriter Adams, who sings and plays on four songs on the album. But, as knocked out as Orton was by the ex-Whiskeytown singer's 2000 Heartbreaker album, their first meeting was less than auspicious.

"I thought he was an ass when I first met him," Orton admitted. "No offense, but I thought he was a cocky American. But then we got in the studio and he was wonderful. There is a beauty and wiseness expressed in his voice ... I thought he must be about 40. I suppose I was really attracted to that and to the crack of his voice [on his album] ... I'm not saying I heard it with my mind, I heard it with my heart."

One of Adams' other contributions, the lush acoustic ballad "This One's Gonna Bruise," wasn't written specifically for Orton, but with its mix of regret and naturalistic imagery, it might as well have been. The wistful story of a galaxy-spanning love reduced to a stack of Polaroids in a cardboard box ends with Orton glumly admitting, "I'm as dead as you."

"I think he wrote it about another girl," she said haltingly, "But with me in mind to sing it." She deflected questions about a rumored romance with the scruffy singer by saying, "All anyone needs to worry about or acknowledge is [what they hear] when they listen to the music. It was definitely a very strong musical connection, which is obvious when you hear the songs."

Orton's first meeting with another musical hero who chipped in on the album also got off to an awkward start, but ended up producing one of the record's most emotionally resonant songs, "Concrete Sky," another duet with Adams.

Orton met ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr backstage after one of her sets on the 1999 Lilith Fair. Introduced through a friend, Orton immediately struck up a conversation with the guitarist for the band she had an intense love/hate relationship with as a teen in England.

"I was and I wasn't a fan," she said of the Smiths. "They were everywhere, you couldn't get away from them growing up in England, especially in a small town. [But] I really liked him as a person when we met and we got on really well and we were talking, talking. Then I asked him, 'So, what do you do, anyway?' I didn't know who he was. [When I found out] I thought, 'Oh, f----ing hell!' "

Not the least bit slighted, Marr hooked up with Orton at their hotel that night and, with the help of several bottles of wine, began singing and playing their hearts out with a promise that they'd work together someday.

As confessional as her songs are, Orton is obviously a firm believer in privacy, especially when it comes to her personal relationships. While her liaisons are seemingly laid bare in her songs, the singer said she's careful to phrase them in such a way that only she knows the true meaning of her starry-eyed lyrics.

"There was one boyfriend who used to go on about how they were all about him and he should have a writing credit," she laughed. "I told him to f--- off."