Eilen Jewell had to run away from home to find home in her songs

Growing up in Idaho, in the American midwest where plains ruled and the attitudes and life choices seemed similarly flattened, Eilen​ Jewell​ thought of nothing else but running far enough away for it to matter.

The furthest her family ever travelled was the not-so-distant state of Montana and while they had been in the area for some 150 years, young Eilen (pronounced ee-lin) didn't want to spend a second more than she needed to in Boise.

"It wasn't that I tried to uproot myself necessarily, I just felt a lot of restlessness and wanted to see the world," she says. "I remember the day I learnt the word wanderlust, I was maybe eight years old, and I remember thinking that is the word I've been looking for to describe myself, that's how I feel all the time: I have this wanderlust."

It took her to Santa Fe, where she started busking while at college, Los Angeles, and then cross-country to Boston, where her musical career took off, solo and in the "hillbilly gospel" group the Sacred Shakers. It was there her barbed sweetness and wry toughness made her one of the leading lights of that city's unlikely country music scene and where she met her husband, and drummer, Jason Beek.

All well and standard for the USA, or Australia for that matter, as small-town kid runs to the big city to live a dream. Except that the plains never loosened their grip on Jewell completely, and after more than a decade away she reversed the trend – or maybe lived the original American dream of heading west – and moved back to Boise.

"A lot of my songs were about Idaho and being homesick," she says of those early recordings. So much so that anyone listening to her might not know she had been living and recording in one of the big east coast cities. There was never a sense of Jewell being one of those suburbanites writing about the prairies on a laptop in a Starbucks.

"I really don't have much of an aesthetic for the city. I think my aesthetic lies in rural scenes and rural life," she says. "I didn't really find a lot of inspiration when I was living in Boston in terms of the landscape there. I would always find myself wanting to come back to Idaho to do my writing, so it seemed a natural switch for me to come back to where I feel the most at home. I feel like the songs are here."

The wanderlust had eased, and in any case, if she got the urge she had a job that took her places, including Australia where she's been several times, including earlier this year supporting Jason Isbell. She returns in November for her own shows.

"I wanted to get out of the west for so long and then it took getting out of the west for me to realise that I started out in the place that I really wanted to be."