After releasing her previous album The Cappuccino Songs in 1998, Tikaram retired from the music scene and lived in Italy for a time.

Sentimental sees Tikaram playing the piano on a record for the first time in her career, and not her usual instrument of choice, the guitar.

She eventually decided to record the songs in a warmer, live-in-studio approach without any electronic overdubs and with her voice and the piano as the focal points.

On its release, Nick Coleman of The Independent described Sentimental as a "small-scale, intimate, unfussed and unfussy treatise on the stuff of love".

He added, "It's jazzy and rather solemn – both governed by the singer's soft-fingered piano style – but not in any annoying sense, and the wheezy-brown contralto that is her other special feature is just lovely.