Bettye LaVette admits that she wasn’t listening to rock ’n’ roll radio at  the time the 1960s and ’70s classics she tackles on her new album, Interpretations: The British  Rock Songbook, were popular. “I was listening to mostly black radio then,” she says. “I’m a rhythm & blues singer, and that’s where my music was being played. I had no particular teenage romantic involvement with them.”

No matter—her lack of attachment to the original recordings allowed LaVette to put her own stamp on these reimagined versions. “At one point, every song, including the National Anthem, was just words on a piece of paper,” she figures. “These were just more songs I was learning to sing.”

LaVette admits that it was a challenge to find an emotional connection to songs whose lyrics were, at times, oblique. For instance, she learned that Led Zeppelin’s cryptic “All My Love” (with lines like, “At last the arm is straight, the hand to the loom”) was inspired by the death of Zep singer Robert Plant’s son. She found her way into it from another direction. “I made it a man-woman relationship,” she says. “I made the guy the cloth, I made the loom my past, I made the ‘feather in the wind’ the bitch,” she laughs. “It made a story in my head.” Similarly, LaVette learned that Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” had been written for onetime Floyd frontman Syd Barrett. “But I was singing it for David Ruffin and Marvin Gaye, and all my friends from then who stuck with me so long and had such good thoughts for me,” she says. “I wish they could see this.”

“This” is one of the most satisfying comebacks in the history of pop. After she first made her name in the early 1960s, “the sugar turned to shit,” as she puts it. LaVette bounced among labels through the ’60s and ’70s. In the decades that followed, she did everything from tap-dancing with Cab Calloway on Broadway to playing anonymous piano-lounge gigs. “I always tell my audience, ‘You know, it’s only been about five years since I actually had the addresses of all of my fans,’” she notes with a laugh. But in the new millennium she has at last found the mass audience she deserves. LaVette sang at an Obama inaugural concert and the Kennedy Center Honors—and the men behind those shows, Rob Mathes and Michael Stevens, co-produced the record. “We just happened to feel the exact same way at the same time,” she says of the pair. “Kind of like when people meet each other at a bar and run off and get married.”

–Chris Willman