INA Forsman was standing in Wire Recording Studio in Austin, Texas and the feeling was ever so slightly unreal. Here she was, a young woman from Helsinki, Finland, standing on the spot where major blues talents including legendary Muddy Waters comrade in arms James Cotton, the great Ruthie Foster and leather-tonsilled Texan Delbert McClinton have laid down tracks.

On top of that it was Forsman’s first time working with high level studio session musicians and she’d flown into Austin for just long enough to give herself a week to capture the songs she’d written and turn out a debut album for leading European blues label Ruf Records that would come up to the mark.

“It was amazing,” says Forsman, who makes her Scottish debut this week, from her tour bus between gigs in Hannover and the Dutch city of Groningen. “I would be trying to explain to these musicians, who had seen everything and done everything, how I wanted my songs to sound – and they’d do it perfectly. It was hard work for me, very intense. I got to the studio every morning early and it would be dark by the time I got back to the hotel, but it was very special and everything worked out well.”

The resultant album, titled simply Ina Forsman, has marked the singer out as many Europeans blues observers’ next big thing. Raw, honest and written from experience, her songs talk about how she’s got “pretty messed up” over her departed boyfriend or is having drunken sex and are sung in a voice that’s passionate and intent on telling her audience the truth.

She’s sung for as long as she can remember and was apparently six years old when she told her parents that she was going to be a professional singer. For her next birthday her aunt gave her a Christina Aguilera album and this merely reinforced the young Forsman’s ambition. In her teens she sang pop songs in talent shows and at seventeen she turned professional, initially still singing pop but beginning to look for the style of music that she really wanted to make. Enter the blues of Etta James and the soul records of Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke.

“I love strong vocals and these singers all had strong voices and strong personalities,” she says. “But they all also have pain in their voices and that’s what really appealed to me.”

The Finnish harmonica player Helge Tallqvist took her under his wing and taught her, she says, so much about being a musician, about organising gigs, putting a programme together and life in general. He also taught her that music has to be a personal expression and the importance of sounding original. From her early reliance on finding good material from other people’s records she switched to telling her own story, writing lyrics and co-writing the music with another harmonica player, Tomi Leino.

“I’d always written songs but I was honest enough with myself to know that they weren’t good enough and if I was going to make a record I’d have to get a whole lot more serious about my writing,” she says. “So, when I knew I would be going to Austin last year, I had a goal in mind. I wasn’t writing songs for fun any more because I was planning to release them under my own name and they had to be of a certain standard.”

The song writing process fascinates her. Sometimes she’ll have the initial idea and then thirty minutes later she has the whole thing done and dusted. Other times the initial idea precedes the first line’s arrival by six months.

“You never know where the next inspiration is coming from,” she says. “I sometimes have this masterpiece in my mind but I can’t get it down on paper. I’ve learned not to force it, though, because if you give it time to grow, the story develops almost by itself and it comes out when it’s ready to reveal itself.”

On her first trip to Scotland Forsman was hoping to have expert guidance from the guitarist in her band, Robbie Hill, a Fifer who has been based in Helsinki for the past five years. He’s been less than forthcoming, however, and she suspects she might be being set up for a social faux-pas. She sounds like someone who can hold her own in a band bus, though, and she sums up her onstage personality as “not quiet”.

“I tend not to get nervous before a performance,” she says. “And there’s a lot of energy in our music. I just like to go out there and tell my story and hope that the people will listen. It’s nice when they like it, of course, but getting your music listened to is the most important thing for any musician.”

Ina Forsman plays Dunfermline's Carnegie Hall (afternoon) and Watts, Cupar (evening) tomorrow [Saturday, February 11] and Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh on Friday February 17.