Goodbye bedsit blues, hello des New York res. Now installed in a huge loft in a converted ice warehouse, cult heroine Suzanne Vega casts off the mournful balladeer image with her playful new album. Adriaane Pielou listens in.

Suzanne Vega, queen of the mournful story-song about solitude and suffering, hopes finally to shake off the timid waif tag with her playful new album.

The queen of bedsit blues turns out to live in quite the hippest des New York res. A huge loft with its own roof garden in a converted ice warehouse down near the Hudson in lower Manhattan, with long muslin curtains that sway in the breeze, exposed brick walls, lots of cushions and plants, piles of books everywhere, two cats, two white birds in a cage, and an eclectic mix of paintings and sculpture, including a self-portrait.

That's what our photographer reported back, anyway. Suzanne Vega allowed only the pictures to be done at her apartment. For our meeting she insisted on the anonymity of her record company's office on W 21st Street.

A cult heroine since the unexpected success of her first album, back in 1985, she is clearly selective regarding what she reveals about herself. Her songs may sound intimate, with her unadorned voice ("I like to think of it as a pencil, plain and useful, ordinary") and habit of singing very close to the mike. The uniformly unhappy things she writes about - most famously, on her worldwide hit "Luka", about an abused boy who won't admit his abuse - are always delicately and minutely observed. But you don't actually learn much about Suzanne Vega the person from them.

"I don't feel it's appropriate people know that," she says several times during our conversation. It is always about things I feel sure fans would be fascinated by.

She is happy to discuss the meaning of her songs. What the title song of her new album, 99.9 F, is about, for instance. "It's a flirting song, the idea of being with a man and there's something off the normal happening. Things could rise," she says in a measured, rather school-prefectish voice. "Sort of a dirty joke, a tease, the idea a person is on the edge of burning. A little like Peggy Lee's "Fever" but more specific. A little of the beat, which is how I see myself."

Her song writing technique and what inspired that particular song also prompt a long explanation. "I was in London and someone asked what the weather had been like in New York; I said, oh, zero degrees, and then that rang in my mind and I thought, wow, that's an interesting phrase, I'd like to write a song called "Zero Degrees Fahrenheit". But I thought it was too much like "Less Than Zero" which is Elvis Costello so I thought, well maybe 99.9..."

But a bald question such as, "How much have you earned from selling five million records, Suzanne? is like pulling the wings off a butterfly. "I won't tell you," she says stiffly. Why not? "Because I don't want to." Why not I pursue.

"I feel that's a private thing. I mean I'm proud of the amount I've made but I don't think it's part of my character. If I were to lose all of it tomorrow I would still be myself, so... I don't feel it's a part of my persona that I want everyone in England to read about," she replies, her pale skin flushing slightly. She is also reticent about the songs she's written that will never get on any album. "Some are just too personal or it's like other people wouldn't understand... I'm aware it sounds kind of stingy and mean but there are some things I don't think an audience wants to hear. I don't feel it's right to blurt out my confessional private secrets."

Her first album, Suzanne Vega, with its string of sad, melodic little story-songs - "Marlene on the Wall" was about coping with loneliness comforted by a Dietrich poster, "Small Blue Thing" about her being a marble in someone's pocket - turned out to be a seminal success of the mid-80s. Expected to sell only to the beard-and-sandals folk brigade in the Greenwich Village bars she'd sung at since she was 15, instead it sold over a million. It paved the way for record companies to sign up Tracy Chapman, Tanita Tikaram, kd lang and other plangent-voiced women soloists with an acoustic guitar and three-in-the-morning style of delivery.

Propelled by the worldwide success of the single "Luka", her second album, Solitude Standing, sold over three million. That was followed by Days Of Open Hand, which she produced herself, and which didn't do so spectacularly - sales back around a million. So the new album, her fourth - "more rock-ish, more playful and accessible" as she describes it - is obviously going to be a decisive one. Which way it'll go, though, she couldn't say.

Reviews of her work are always mixed: "Heady, heartfelt art music"; "Vega can't see the forest for the condensation on a quivering leaf." But the songs she's been most successful with, "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" (about sitting in a coffee shop watching the world shamble by(, were things she wrote for herself with no thought of them being commercial. "So I've accepted that if I do something just because I like it, it's likely to have much more chance of hitting," she muses. "The whole thing goes up and down anyway - sometimes you're wildly successful, sometimes you're not, so you may as well have a good time."

In the meantime, though, she does hope the new album might finally lose her that timid waif tag. You can see why she got it. She has a soft voice, she sings about attempted suicide and people dying, and she's physically slight - five foot six and just over seven stone. You can also see why she's completely exasperated with it. Under that reserved manner she's really rather tough. It's a wounded toughness, though, that seems to have been gained during a turbulent childhood.

With her fair skin and reddish hair she is the lest likely looking Puerto Rican you can imagine, but that's what she assumed she was as a child, growing up on 112th street in a rough Hispanic neighbourhood. The man she thought was her father - volatile Puerto Rican novelist Ed Vega - constantly challenged the withdrawn, bookish Suzanne to be more rebellious. When she wasn't agonising over that failure she was out in the mean streets having to punch out bullies on behalf of her two little brothers and sister.

One day, when Suzanne was nine, Ed Vega paused between political arguments with her half-Swedish mother to reveal he was only her stepfather. The shock hardened her shell. Suddenly her shaming lack of Latin fieriness made sense, but as the only white girl in the area she'd become another kind of misfit. Home was clearly no haven.

"The family I grew up in had its problems..." she says, after a long pause. "But I don't talk about the... specific problems we had growing up because I still see them all."

I ask why she feels so particularly passionately about child abuse. "Luka" was so moving she received thousands of letters from people all over the world telling her about their own, until then, repressed memories of abuse.

"That's actually the message behind a lot of my songs - that you must protect those who are weaker than you," she says, looking at me piercingly. "Violence between a man and a woman is bad enough. Violence between an adult and a child is even worse because the child has no way of choosing. The horror and disgust I feel about it spills over to political situations, too, to what Amnesty talks about, people tortured for their beliefs, for no other reason than that they are there. To me they're equally evil."

But perhaps the wounded feeling she transmits is a result of having spent the first five weeks of her life in an incubator - something she discovered only this June, when her mother called to wish her happy birthday.

"I was two and a half pounds when I was born, two months premature. My sense of myself has always been as a very small person fighting against a very large world that is maybe interested, maybe not interested," she explains.

It wasn't until five years ago that she met her real father, Richard. On impulse she decided to hire a private detective to track him down. He turned out to be not the thin intellectual Suzanne had imagined, but a large, jolly Californian who nevertheless delighted her by displaying a number of characteristics she recognised in herself. "There's a singer called Suzanne Vega," he told her after she first introduced herself. When she sent him her early videos he was delighted to be able to fill in some of the blanks and see what she'd been like in her 20s. "It's very interesting having a father," she says thoughtfully. Now they talk regularly on the phone, and he has entered her small circle of confidants.

"I find it as difficult as it ever was to make friends," she admits. "I have acquaintances but I can't say I have lots of close friends. But I never did." The closest are two women. One a designer whose clothes she wears a lot, and the other a flute player from her year at New York's High School for the Performing Arts - the Fame school, where she trained as a dancer during the miserable years when she was trying to be an extrovert.

Once her teachers there had persuaded her to direct her talents elsewhere she signed up for a year at Columbia University, following that with a string of temporary jobs. She gave up the last, as a receptionist at a typesetting firm, when her first album came out and A&M despatched her on her first world tour.

At 33, she's now spent the best part of the last ten years touring. Not in the States so much as Europe - she fills the Albert Hall - and Japan. She copes with writing in her ubiquitous notebooks, reading a lot, looking out of the hotel window and daydreaming. As a lifestyle, she says, it's starting to wear thin. And it's no way to be if you want to have any kind of family.

She split up with her last boyfriend - English a year ago. "When I started doing all this, when I was 24, I thought by the time I was 33 it would have been taken care of and I would be married. Instead, you take a bunch of left turns and end up..." she trails off.

Being on her own does at least give her time to loll on her sofa for hours on end, reading Wuthering Heights over and over again, a lot of Dickens, endless glossy magazines. "I read tons of magazines. I crave them," she says dreamily. "Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Time, all of them. I like that steady stream of information and fashion ideas and ways of presenting yourself and make-up and all that stuff." A practising Buddhist, she chants every day. Sometimes she has phases of going out a lot. You wouldn't think she was a partying kind of person, but when she's in the mood she'll stay out until eight in the morning. "When I do party I'm a really hearty partier - always the first to arrive and the last to leave - and I make a big pest of myself, I tell you. I like to dance and drink beer and Jack Daniel's. The poor hostess is there yawning."

"And then I love walking home at night. I like knowing that I can take care of myself in the street. I haven't had to prove it in a long time, but I feel I can." She laughs, and taps the wooden desk. "But you should never brag about that."

Does she get recognised in the street? "Some days. It seems to be a thing that flashes on of its own will. Some days I can walk around and see people turning around and going oh, it's Suzanne Vega, and there's other days where I can't even get into my own bank because they think I'm a messenger," she says ruefully.

Half an hour later she's off, to home and privacy. I watch her cross the street. Not frail, not timid, but - sorry, Suzanne - rather vulnerable looking for a street-fighting woman. Even a wealthy one.

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