His new single 'Earring' began during somebody else's tour. Welch was driving Cryogeyser around the UK when he found himself waiting in a guitar shop and wrote the main riff in a couple of minutes. There was heartbreak in the background of that trip, too, alongside a car stereo introducing him to American post-rock. He initially imagined Cryogeyser's Shawn Marom singing it, but the band were back on the road by the time he needed a finished song, so he took the vocal himself.

"Other melodies and sections I pulled in from as long ago as 2014," he says. The lyrics went through their own process of excavation, with around five pages of possibilities cut down to a handful of impressions. "If these albums had a one-word theme, it could be 'lostness', and this song is more or less a straight embodiment of that."

On the page, 'Earring' keeps trying to locate the person at its centre. There's the almost weightless feeling of its opening, the repeated demand to be looked at, then a series of questions about who this actually is. In the middle of it all, someone goes out without lights or a helmet, whistling like a ramshackle R2D2. It's a lovely, faintly reckless image: briefly enjoying being alone, while possibly remaining a danger to moving traffic.

Welch's friend Anton Munar immediately decided the song should go third from the end when he heard it, and that is where it sits on 'Songs About Women'. "Emotionally it starts with a feeling of building itself back up from a wreck, but then once it gets going it has this dazed, slanted energy rather than clarity, so I think of its place in the album as giving a false resolution." He allows it one further important distinction: "It's the only part of either album that I would describe as cool".

Growing up in an isolated stretch of countryside with bad internet, he learned instruments, acquired a laptop at thirteen and started assembling music from loops. His teenage band education took in indie rock, reggae and swing, along with a student Frank Zappa tribute act organised by a school music teacher. At art school, he was still making it alone.

"I stayed up until like 4am most days making this odd electronic music and feeling like it was writing itself, and I really loved and relied on that feeling," he says. For a couple of years, he kept it in his room, neither showing people nor finding a way to reconcile it with visual art. "I felt like I'd lost the ability to write, and I had a really long, bad creative crisis."

Lockdown finally brought the ability to get beyond a few bars again. He graduated, moved to Glasgow and began to reconsider what he wanted to do. "I realised that I was making music whether I tried to or not, and that the same thing would happen again unless I took ownership and became serious about it."

With an album and a few EPs already behind him, Welch's assessment of his back catalogue is that "some of it's pretty good". His pick for newcomers is 'The Bar', "probably the recording I'm happiest with so far". He does warn that it's long, which seems fair coming from a man about to release two albums at once.

He hadn't been a musical-theatre kid. Getting interested in the form came later, as he liked the permission it gave him to be sentimental. His songs had already been heading that way, so he decided to follow them. On the musical's 'Mallorca', a guest is leaving with all their possessions in a bag, their soul apparently having caught an earlier flight. 'Whisky' reaches the more familiar point in the evening when the cupboard is empty and nobody wants to go.

"I didn't start writing a breakup album at all, but breakups give you a lot of unstraightforward feelings to articulate, and I'm not very good at articulating them in real life, so as soon as I started working on the lyrics for this project, they of course became about that," he explains. "And I tried to resist this at first because it felt kind of ridiculous and solipsistic, but then I thought the idea of half-converting this fake musical into an album where I sincerely sing about my feelings was actually a really funny idea, so I leant into it."

In 'Up There Laughing', a man worries that he's too good at sex, hooks up with an arms dealer on Mumsnet and gets chased out of town by jealous husbands. It's happened to the best of us. In the chorus, he's asking someone to hold his hand. A quieter guest simply picks up a coat and leaves in 'Moon Going Down', dispensing with goodbyes.

"But I do like 'serious' music that embraces laughter," he says. "It feels odd to me that so much music seems to aim for emotional truth without acknowledging that part of the spectrum." He isn't deliberately hunting for gags, preferring whatever feels like the strongest line. For his money, the funniest ones belong to Munar on 'I Get Sick', a song they improvised in a single take around 2018 and which still makes him laugh.

Welch began the first half of the project by trying to restrict songs to three or four instruments, then gradually filled the gaps. For the musical, he wanted the impression of "a large but not entirely slick pit orchestra". On 'Earring', Otis Jordan plays drums, and Florence Campbell-Grey supplies backing vocals; elsewhere, Chris Small's trombone and Masha Zhuravlova's violin join Welch's own contributions. Much of his recording happened at home, although the list of locations also includes Sherbrooke Mosspark Parish Church.

"I tried putting that church organ on a lot more songs initially: it sounded so great in the church." Some of the moments he likes best arrived accidentally, including the vibraphone at the start of 'Whisky' and strings halfway through 'Punisher'. On 'Mallorca', guitarist Alex Handyside took a more exhaustive route to a similar result: "he did around 50 takes, and this was his fuckaround one right at the end."

Welch describes the two albums as "two different lights on the same situation". The supposedly straight record can be every bit as peculiar as the musical: the words of 'The Future of My Heart' send a detective off to arrest himself, while 'Menu Road' rattles through a succession of lives that includes Anna Nicole Smith and a dog on a Jesuit mission.

"I'd say most of these aren't actually me at all - the lyrics do always start from a real feeling or story, but they have to go through a bit of fictionalisation before I'm happy with them as songs," he says. He's wary of calling the people in them characters, too, suggesting that "maybe it's more like as a singer you're playing attitudes, or something. I'm much more precise on the records."

When we ask if he's learnt anything surprising about himself, he replies: "I have, and you can buy them on bandcamp to find out what!" (Fair play - Ed.) He follows up with "In all seriousness, though, I have."

Asked where he hopes the albums take him, Welch initially opts for "As far as possible." Then: "To be honest, I'm completely sick of both of them at the moment, so musically they'll be sending me somewhere different." For the listener, he suggests "a couple of times around the block and back to the front door", before offering a final qualification on the way out: "it's too late now to change the album title."

Songs about plumbers replacing your stopcock will have to be the follow-up, then. It's got a ring to it.

Stanley Welch's albums 'Songs About Women' and 'Songs About Women - The Musical' are out 4th December.