Migratory birds know that there’s a time for leaving, but a time for returning too. Sarah Jane Morris understands all that. Though this album’s title song is a quiet plea to a loved one’s migratory spirit (to remember, in the end, where home is), the singer knows the subversive impulse through her own wild-bird soul. On stage, she’s a possessed, impulsive, bright-plumed creature that seems to have swooped in on the audience unannounced - perching restlessly to pour out songs in a private language pulsing with life, then vanishing. The tension between surrendering to love and avoiding the cage has been the essence of her music for years.

But to describe Sarah Jane Morris’s eloquence only in terms of songs of love and parting tells only part of the story. Then there’s the astonishing four-octave voice that has brought her comparisons with Nina Simone, Janis Joplin and Sarah Vaughan (and even the basement-register rasp of Tom Waits), and the intensity that comes from a combination of a personal politics and deep emotions courageously faced, all adding up to the uniquely revealing artist she is. By some of Morris’s previous standards - like her fierce counterpoise to Jimmy Somerville's falsetto on The Communards' 1986 No 1 hit ‘Don't Leave Me This Way’, and all kinds of work with driving soul-funk bands and jazzy big bands - this is an intimate selection of songs that borders on private meditation. But Morris can’t help but communicate, however low she drops the volume. Even in her most private moments, everybody understands.

On her 2006 retrospective album, After All These Years (a celebration of 25 years on the road) Sarah Jane Morris featured a raft of illustrious partners including the free-spirited Tom Waits’ guitarist Marc Ribot - a fertile connection that goes back to 2001, when Ribot and Morris collaborated on the delicate conversation ‘August’, that is the forerunner of ‘Migratory Birds’. If Ribot links Morris to Waits, there’s an appropriate symmetry in it. Waits’ world of preoccupied, unsentimental confession, blues-inflected melody, surreal soulfulness and bursts of gruff exhilaration is very close to Sarah Jane’s.

So Ribot is a crucial presence on this album. Ralph Carney, the Tom Waits brass arranger, who burnishes 'If You Want Me To Stay' on this set, is another. So, of course, is Morris’s husband, ex-Pogue David Coulter, whose ethereal shimmer on musical saw adds deeper mysteries to ‘Pale Blue Eyes‘ and ‘Wild Horses‘. Sarah Jane Morris’s friend Sandy Dillon adds pedal organ to several of the choruses of these fragile songs, and jazz legend Charles Mingus’ singer son Eric duets with Sarah Jane on ‘Wild Horses’. Like all the contributors to ‘Migratory Birds’, Mingus is a kindred spirit, unafraid (like his father) to display vulnerability, but similarly confident in the healing powers of honest music-making too.

The songs speak for themselves, but a few asides might be appropriate. Only one, the haunting title track, is a Morris original, co-written with Johnny Brown and her guitarist Kevin Armstrong - who plays the soft Latin acoustic groove that cushions the eventual arrival of Marc Ribot’s evocative high-register birdsong. There’s a distinctly un-Britney-like ambiguity to Spears’ pop hit Toxic, an approach much closer to sinister possibilities that Tom Waits might have explored. Rickie Lee Jones’ Skeletons seems like a sharp contrast, with its lilting, folk-ballad feel, but the lyric what do birds leave behind, of the wings they came with chimes tellingly with the title track. Bob Dylan’s classic Just Like A Woman delays being autobiographical until the startling finale, and Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes is unfurled as a rare mix of country music’s communality and Morris’s private reflection. Janis Ian’s Seventeen gets a statuesque, impassively uninflected treatment, as if its fierce message should have been obvious to everyone all along. Dylan’s To Ramona is wistful but the duet with the guitar gives it muscle, Just When I Needed You Most reminds Morris of a heart-wrenching Dolly Parton version that she wanted to pare down without losing the raw emotion, and Irish troubadour Damien Rice’s hit The Blower’s Daughter has its exquisitely scary repeating lyric of I can’t take my eyes off of you dramatised by the swelling counterpoint of Bonfire Madigan, the punk cellist from San Francisco. There’s close to a free-improv wildness in Sarah Jane’s crackling account of Bessie Smith’s classic Sugar, and Eric Mingus’ rich vibrato couples with her frank declarations over the hum of the saw and combined guitars on a contemplative version of the Rolling Stones' Wild Horses. Morris goes out in her most spookily capricious guise on If You Want Me To Stay, with the most clamorous group sound on the session suggesting a very different and very crowded world out there.

Whether Sarah Jane Morris might sidestep it or rejoin it is the question Migratory Birds leaves you with. That’s what a work in progress - life, after all - is all about.