Asking Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall [ tickets ] if she wants to talk about about her recent guest appearance on Daryl Hall's LiveFromDarylsHouse.com webcast is like asking a child if she wants candy. Tunstall lets out a high-pitched squeal that could be vaguely recognized as a "Yes!"

The one-off gig with the rock legend took place at his London, England, home. The pair collaborated on a host of songs, including "Kiss On My List" and "Out Of Touch," as well as Tunstall's hit "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree." Hall's website allows fans to watch him perform with famous musicians in special live recordings from his US and UK homes.

"Oh my God, it was a thrill," Tunstall said in a phone conversation from Ipswich, England. "It was so cool. He's such an amazing guy. He's really one of the best singers I've ever sung with. The harmonies and the melodies on the Hall and Oates stuff are really unparalleled. When he just cracked into this amazing harmony on [Tunstall's] 'If Only,' and he's singing with me all the way through, I was like, 'Surely, this is never going to work.' I look back now and think, 'God, it's great.'"

The song "If Only" appears on Tunstall's sophomore effort "Drastic Fantastic," which she is touring behind. Tunstall spoke with LiveDaily about the album and her love of playing live.

LiveDaily: Before you called, I was Googling some of your live reviews, and they're consistently great.

KT Tunstall [ tickets ]: I'm so, so pleased that you say that. I don't see them all. I'm really, really happy to hear that. It's the gold mine for me when it comes to being a musician. That's what it's all about for me. It's fantastic that it's going down well.

It sounds like you love to perform live.

Yeah, absolutely. It's my reason for being. I've always found it quite hard to make albums and to go in the studio to record. It's so analytical and scientific. It's this whole thing where you're trying to find some kind of perfection that doesn't really exist. When it comes to a gig, I just love the fact it's so momentary. You can try and record it or whatever, but really it's about being in the room at the same time.

On "Drastic Fantastic," it seems like you experimented a bit more. Did you feel more confident this time around in the studio?

I did. I certainly did. It' still a weird environment for me, when you're going in every day and kind of going through things over and over again. I'm really impatient, so I'm not very good at doing it. With "Drastic Fantastic," what I really wanted to do was enjoy making it a little more complex than the first one [2004's "Eye to the Telescope," which was released in the US in 2006]. So the instrumentation and the arrangements are really satisfying on this second album, whereas, I wasn't even really thinking about it on the first one. It was very simply presenting the songs I had written. On this one, there's a bit more guitar-solo work, there's a couple of string arrangements, there's a lot of work going into backing vocals and general instrumentation on the tunes. It was great fun to do that.

Why did you decide to call it "Drastic Fantastic"?

I wanted it to sound like a comic book. I really wanted it to look like a comic book, as well. You've got the comic strip inside. For the cover, it was going to be a painting, and the guy I was working with on the artwork did the painting and it really is beautiful, but it didn't have that edginess that I wanted. With a comic book, it has to be memorable and kind of slap you in the face. That photograph, which wasn't intended to be the cover, ended up on the front cover.

Did you keep the painting?

Actually the artist has it. It's remained with him. But it's a real favorite piece of artwork related to my music. It's very, very special. "If Only" was released as a single in the UK, and it was used as the artwork. We've got beautiful posters of it on the road. It's a really special thing to have.

I really enjoyed your acoustic album "KT Tunstall's Acoustic Extravaganza."

You'll enjoy the tour, then. That's really the inspiration for the upcoming tour in the States. It was also on the "Drastic Fantastic" deluxe version. There's an hour-long film that comes with the album. I'm good friends with Alex James, who's the bassist from Blur. He has a fantastic place up in Oxfordshire, north of London, where he has loads of fields. We just said, "Can we come up and make a film of just playing around a campfire?" He was really up for it. So we went up there and it was just gorgeous. We just had little microphones hidden in our clothing and sat around this campfire and filmed it. It was so intimate and special and magical. We just thought it would be great to reconstruct that feeling and present the new album in a real simple acoustic form.

Why do you think you've been able to break in the US, when bands like Blur have not, to a significant degree?

Partly because I'm really quite strongly influenced by a lot of American artists. Many of the British acts that haven't been able to crack America are very intrinsically British acts and sound very British and have very British attitudes, i.e., they're really rude. [Laughs] The first stuff I really fell in love with was Tom Waits, Beck, Velvet Underground, James Brown and Bob Dylan, and there's a lot of other American artists. Also, as a musician, my roots will always be with traditional singer/songwriting, acoustic singer/songwriting. America has a much, much deeper tradition of that than Britain. Britain is much more well known for its rock and garage bands. The singer/songwriter scene in Britain has always had this stigma of being very depressing, which has recently changed. Now you've got, like, really good young British solo acts. Even, like, Mike Skinner, who's The Streets, can be classed as a British singer/songwriter, but it's so fresh. You've got Kate Nash, too. There are very varied styles coming out now. A lot of the times, it was the girl in coffee shop slitting wrists publicly. I never related to that. I related much more when I came over to the states as a teenager and went around to open-mic nights in Chicago and Vermont, and down in Texas and just played and busked on the streets. There's a real vibrancy to singer/songwriting in America, the tradition of it. Certainly, the West Coast scene was a big influence on the first album.