Suzanne Vega: I hope my new album is a classic

She comes briskly into the anonymous London hotel bar a little late and without apology, brandishing a packet of tea that she has just this minute bought from a little shop around the corner. "Decaffeinated," she says. "I can't bear the sort they serve here." She takes off her black hat, but decides to keep on her coat, also black, which is fastened all the way up to the neck. As she pours boiling water into a china cup and adds the teabag, a passing waiter looks on with a wry smile.

Now 47 years old, Suzanne Vega in the flesh is much as you would expect of a woman who once sang, in such a coldly stilted voice, "Today I am a small blue thing/ Like a marble, or an eye." Contrasting with her dark clothes and pale white skin is a pair of lips thickly smeared in pink, a colour one would expect more on Pamela Anderson. These lips, however, do not pout but rather maintain a pinched expression that suggests that they have just come into contact with bitter lemon.

The singer is, at last, back in the business of recording and releasing music. Beauty & Crime, her seventh studio album, represents her first new work in six long years.

"Am I happy about it?" she repeats, testily. "Happy about what, exactly?" In attempt to rephrase the question, I ask instead what it feels like to be back in a spotlight that, over the years, has been rather kind to her.

"Well, it's nice, of course it is, and I do like being able not only to play my songs to an audience but also to talk about my work with - well, with people like you," she says, mellowing slightly. "It is, after all, what I do, right?"

Though never exactly one to blow her own trumpet she has nevertheless found it necessary to announce, via her website, that her aim with Beauty & Crime was to create a modern classic, something comparable to Lou Reed's Berlin, which she adores.

"That, I found, was the clearest way to explain to people the kind of record I wanted to make," she says, blowing on her tea and waiting for the steam to clear before sipping. "I wanted to stretch myself here, not just to make a regular folk album, but to use modern textures, strings, orchestration and such."

A series of 11 snapshots about New York and some of its more curious inhabitants, the album's running theme is of an embattled city in the wake of September 11. She writes about local graffiti artists ("Zephyr & I"), women who die in pursuit of beauty ("Figurines") and policemen on duty near the World Trade Centre on that fateful autumn morning in 2001 ("Angel's Doorway").

"Only time will tell whether I have, in fact, made a modern classic," she says, "but I'm mostly very happy with it. Much more happy than I am, for example, with some of my earlier work." It transpires that she isn't fond of her self-titled 1985 debut. "I know," she smiles, "it's ironic, isn't it? The one album of mine that people love and feel so very nostalgic towards is the one I can't even listen to anymore. All it represents to me is restrictions I felt then, and my naivety."

Several songs on Beauty & Crime, particularly "Ludlow Street" and "Anniversary", concern her older brother, Timothy, who died less than a year after the attacks. "The whole event rather unhinged his entire life," she says. "He died of alcoholism, and it was his death along with a few more boring, business-related issues [she parted with her former label, and then sacked her management team] that kept me otherwise engaged these past six years. I never meant for things to drag out that long. And so yes, in answer to your first question, I am happy to be back." She very nearly manages a full smile. "Why ever wouldn't I be?"

The woman brought up in New York's Spanish Harlem initially harboured ambitions to become a dancer. She enrolled at the New York School of Performing Arts (later immortalised in the film Fame), but soon realised that she actually felt more drawn towards music. Her pursuit of a recording contract lasted 10 years.

"Most people thought I'd never land one," she notes. "They thought I was odd and shy, which I am, and that I didn't have the right image. If you look at the world of pop, not just today but back in the Seventies and Eighties as well, it was always full of girls dancing in short skirts and bustiers. People would take one look at me and say [pointing to her chest], Well, not much bustier there, and then criticise my songs for being too poetic and weird and not catchy enough..."

They were right, of course. Her self-titled 1985 debut was a curiously brittle thing of ornate, fragile poetry. The opening "Crackin'", for example, contains the line, "My footsteps are ticking/ Like water dripping from a tree", sung in a voice that sounds utterly bereft of hope. But there was also much quiet splendour, and an exquisite way with a narrative that would later influence everyone from Jewel to KT Tunstall.

Basing its optimism on her small folk-circuit following, her record company anticipated potential sales of 30,000. Instead, the disc shifted a million. Two years later, Solitude Standing's lead single "Luka", a honeyed pop melody married to a lyric about child abuse, propelled her into the Top 5, the album selling three times as many as its predecessor, and making her a bona-fide pop star. In 1990, the British dance outfit DNA remixed that album's a cappella "Tom's Diner", and added hip-hop beats. The result was a club hit across the world.

"I guess I didn't need to rely on a bustier after all," she says, her smile exquisitely pointed. "Tom's Diner" was to prove her commercial high point, and the albums that followed continued to plough an ever-thoughtful furrow.

"People always say I'm either too voyeuristic and detached or not personal enough. It's certainly true that I don't bleed all over the table for the entertainment of a paying audience, but I'm not quite as cold as people suggest, you know?" This is from a woman still wrapped up in her coat, and seemingly oblivious to the bar's fully functional heating system. But then Vega clearly doesn't offer herself up easily to people, and it is perhaps this that has given her work its unique appeal, her songs both full of empathy and yet simultaneously aloof. There is precious little levity to whatever she does. On her website, for example, she has a very unlikely section entitled Fun Facts, in which it is revealed that she once met the president of Portugal. Her idea of "fun", then, might not necessarily be shared by all.

Recently, Suzanne Vega went away with her new husband (a lawyer), and her 12-year-old daughter. They travelled to Hawaii, and as the singer reclined into a deckchair one lazy afternoon, a hand shielding the sun from her eyes, she realised that this was her first holiday in 17 years.

"That's embarrassing, right? My sister would always take my daughter on vacation because I was forever busy recording and touring. Maybe I'm just not made to relax. I'm certainly happier writing songs, even if the process can sometimes be arduous, and I still feel I've so many songs to write, like I'm only just beginning to scratch away at the iceberg..."

Abruptly, she frowns, her eyebrows like daggers, and Pamela Anderson's pink lips a small "O". "Scratch away at an iceberg? Urgh! I've mixed my metaphors."

The frown is there for good reason. As a rule, Suzanne Vega does not mix her metaphors.

'Beauty & Crime' is out now on EMI. Suzanne Vega tours the UK in June