Jack Savoretti on the release of his latest album

Jack Savoretti has just flown into London, the city where he was born and the place that inspired his full-circle career moment – specifically his latest album, We Will Always Be The Way We Were, which he recorded in the capital’s Eastcote Studios.

Jack, who has collaborated with the likes of Kylie Minogue, Nile Rodgers and Bob Dylan, tells me this is the album that has taken an entire career to make. “It’s taken me 20 years and nine albums to realise how to really make an album,” he says. “I think every album I’m getting better at making records because when I started the only thing that mattered to me was the song.

“We did it in Ladbroke Grove, which is where my music career started, and we made it with all the same guys that I met on Portobello Road 20 years ago. My early albums, they’re kind of just a collection of songs, but that’s changed with age and experience and just trial and error.”

Jack, who was born in Paddington and went to primary school in Sloane Square, is something of a global citizen. He has Italian heritage from his father’s side, an English mother with German and Polish-Jewish ancestry and he studied at an American school in Switzerland. He moved to Los Angeles for a time, before settling in the Cotswolds, where he now lives with his wife and three children.

Trying to understand his identity was not something that had really occurred to him until he became a dad. “Funnily enough, growing up, I always felt very American – my high school was American, all my friends were American. I never felt Italian, I never felt English – I knew that was in me but I never felt it, and then when I had kids suddenly I realised, I think I’m Italian. “There were certain things my English wife and her in-laws would do; I was like, yeah, that’s not how we do things. Like, it’s freezing, put some clothes on my children.

“I joke about this, but when I moved to the village where we live now, when we first got there, people spoke slowly to me. I didn’t find it intimidating or isolating, just interesting, and I totally doubled down on it – I bought the Vespa, I was like, I am going to be that guy from now on, the Italian guy on the coast – I love that.”

Jack started talking to his children in Italian. In fact, the process of becoming a father triggered an identity change within him in which he embraced his Italian culture. It is also what led to three of his albums, Singing to Strangers, Europiana and Miss Italia, drawing inspiration from Italian music, Italian heritage and European music.

Jack sees music albums very much like photo albums – as a snapshot in time. He does not see them as struggles of the kind that some artists wrestle with. In fact, despite playing piano and guitar, Jack wouldn’t call himself a musician. “I’m very musical, but I don’t consider myself a musician,” he says. “My kids now are very musical, but they’re not musicians, and my parents are the same. I don’t read music, my kids don’t read music, nobody in my family reads music.

“However, there isn’t a room in our house that music isn’t being played in. Or my parents, music was everything – from a car trip to Sunday lunch to a dinner party.”

This April and May, the 42-year-old will make his debut at the Royal Albert Hall. The first show sold out in under an hour and Jack jokes about how his arm was twisted to announce a second date. However, he’s glad he did and acknowledges that performing at the legendary venue is a milestone career moment.

He doesn’t like to say he gets nervous, and reframes it as excitement, adding: “The only thing that would make me upset is if I let it fly by and waste that night being nervous or scared and not actually enjoying the moment, so I’m not going to do that. I don’t care if we screw up, it’s more about going and really living it.” It’s been 20 years, and no one is more shocked than Jack; he cannot believe he has stuck with one thing for two decades.

Jack didn’t have a resolute plan to go into music – he had considered all kinds of professions, from footballer to cinematographer to journalist, and he didn’t really know anything about the music industry until he was in it. He adds: “It’s nuts because I have zero expectations in most things and I’m not actually that ambitious, I don’t think. I never look up and I never look down, I always try to look at where I’m putting my hands.”

Growing up in the 1990s, a singer-songwriter wasn’t the type of artist Jack saw in the charts – it was what he associated with the music that he loved from the 1960s. “The 90s were bands – you were either a boy band, girl band or a rock band,” he says. “There was never a guy just singing, and then in the Noughties, Damien Rice showed up with a homemade album with eight songs and everyone was like, oh, that sounds like what I play at home, maybe I could do this.”

To mark his 20th anniversary, Jack has been sent old footage of his very early interviews, which led him to discover a side of himself he wasn’t even aware of. “I’m like, who is that guy and what on earth is he doing? Like, where does he get off thinking that this is an option?

“It’s not arrogance – I’ve always told myself I must have been so arrogant – but I’m looking at the interviews and I wasn’t. There’s a sort of wonderful naivety but also a terrifying focus that I wasn’t aware I had until I looked back.”

Jack Savoretti’s new album, We Will Always Be The Way We Were, is released on April 10, and he performs at the Royal Albert Hall on April 23 and May 27