I like to think that each one has its own experience

I like to think that each one has its own experience, almost like a movie. And in the months before its release she opened for Bob Dylan, an idol since childhood, on a US tour. The Dylan tour marked the first time that Smith had performed live for more than 16 years.Every Smith album has come with its own story “Records for me are a long organic process. She admits that she returned to performing some time after almost as way to emerge from her own mourning. In 1996, she and her band gave us a new album Gone Again, dedicated to Fred. This is sort of how I feel, that I am always somehow recruited again.”It was in 1988 that Smith re-emerged from her self-imposed exile with what she thought would be a one-off album – not in any sense a come-back – called Dream of Life, co-written throughout with her husband. Then at the end of 1994, she suffered the double grief of losing both Fred and one of her brothers to heart failure.

“I withdraw from it and then I come back and then I withdraw from it again It’s like being called back to duty. In my mind I think of my contribution to rock’n'roll has always been for me like military duty Being called back to duty I have always felt like that. She is, she admits with some coyness, a “reluctant rock star”. “I thought I was going to be doing my laundry and the things that one does.”But something, as Smith now recognises, has always eventually called her back to sing and to perform. She moved with her now-late husband, Fred Smith, formerly of the band MC5, to the suburbs of Detroit and remained there out of her fans’ reach to raise her two children. Her span of 1970s fame, generated by records that included Horses , Radio Ethiopia and, her most successful, Easter, which included the collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, “Because the Night”, seemed to her to have reached its natural end. (An exhibition of her life’s work, including an eerie series of silk-screens of the skeletal remains of the destroyed Twin Towers of lower Manhattan is touring European galleries this year.) And, as she points out many times, she also does the other thing that is important to her: she works at being a mother.That is what she thought she was retiring to in 1980, when Smith, now 57, essentially disappeared from the music scene.

She is a rare being on the music scene – a truly intellectual performer. When she is not making records or touring with her band, she is studying or doing her art. “I just don’t believe in putting out just a bunch of songs on a record,” she explains, perched on a shabby, white-sheet-draped sofa in the shop-cum-studio “I am not career driven. I have absolutely no concern about career.”You take this on face value – something you’d be unlikely to do if it came from almost anyone else in the entertainment world – because it is clear that Smith really means it. When she does deliver new songs, it is because she has something to say.This is a luxury affordable only to someone who is as unmoved by the promise of prolific fame as with that of prolific wealth.

And in so far as she is ready to brag about anything – and she does just a little, especially about her new album, which comes out next month – Smith will confirm that this is true. There is nothing phoney, nothing opportunistic, nothing commercial about this artist In those three decades she has recorded sparingly This will be only her ninth album. “If you had done an interview with me in 1972, I might be dressed just about the same,” she says. That is in denims and a long black jacket with smudges of white stain on its sleeves.