"Forget about age" is singer/songwriter Shawn Colvin's advice to hard-working but frustrated performers who aren't selling platinum by their 20th birthday. And though Colvin's sincere songs and plaintive voice makes her age somewhat beside the point, it's still unusual for a performer to enjoy her first bona fide radio hit at the age of 41. Her music is just as atypical: At a time when Jewel and Alanis Morissette offer cherubic innocence and calculated angst, Colvin tackles such mature themes as divorce and mid-life crises.

\\Born in Vermillion, S. D., Colvin began performing at 19, logging time in the coffee house and club circuits of Austin, Texas, San Francisco and New York for more than a decade and battling depression and alcoholism before landing a recording contract at 31. Critical success was immediate -- her debut album, 1988's "Steady On," won a Grammy for Best Folk Recording -- but none of her albums really took off commercially until the haunting, elegiac revenge fantasy "Sunny Came Home" caught fire on radio. Largely on the strength of its airplay, Colvin's most recent album, "A Few Small Repairs," has gone gold, in the process making her more of a household name than an up-and-comer.

\\Has the success of "Sunny Came Home" affected your day-to-day life yet?

\\No ... the income boost must come later [laughs]. It's like, 'Oh, those ASCAP checks will roll in in about a year.' The record sales are good -- I've never had a gold record before -- but I have no idea about the money and try not to think about it. But my job conditions have improved. I meet radio people now and I actually get a little respect. But it's still the same -- I've been touring eight months a year for seven years. That's my living.

\\You're playing 10 dates on the Lilith Fair, which has taken a lot of heat from critics who think it presents a lopsided view of women in music -- one in which everyone sounds like Joni Mitchell. Having cited Joni as a major influence, what are your thoughts on the matter?

\\Well, there are two sides to this. I think you get a lot of variety in this bunch of people -- I don't think Fiona Apple or Sheryl Crow are from the Joni Mitchell school of music. I'd say Sarah McLachlan and I probably are, and the Indigo Girls to some extent, but it's such a drag to break it down to that, given the number of people, both men and women, that have probably influenced us all. Yet I understand the criticism, which there's bound to be. I hear most of the criticism from the media and from other musicians, and I'm sure there's fans out there of Veruca Salt and Hole and a lot of other people who probably wish this was a different type of tour. But you've got to start somewhere, and I'm real proud of it.

\\Speaking of Hole, in one interview you mentioned Courtney Love as the inspiration for some of the bitterness you express in the song "New Thing Now," which includes the line "And it looks so good in print/Just a poet and her pimps ... a prom dress and a sneer/The woman of the year."

\\I really don't want to nail Courtney Love. I think she's talented, but there was a point when I felt saturated by a lot of talking heads, and she was one of them, and I was just, you know, "What the fuck kind of business am I in?" So that's just ... me being forthright about my jealousies or frustrations at being ignored or seeing people typecast or watching the canonization of people who in my opinion maybe didn't deserve it. It's a wacky business.

\\In the lean years before and after you got signed, did you ever consider giving up?

\\I actually did stop in 1985 or '86 for year. It was like a growing up process. In the time I took off and came around to the decision that I wanted to be in the music business, I think I became a hundred percent more professional. And I think my idea was to give myself until I was 35. The first record came out when I was 31, so I beat my deadline by a few years.

\\Didn't you think about quitting again after you won your Grammy?

\\In retrospect, that seems slightly melodramatic. But it was a perfect little ride up to that point: it takes a long time, you make your first record, and get a nice accolade for it. And I think, briefly, I thought, "Why can't I just stop here? This is nice." But I had things to prove to myself -- being able to write more, and make a second record. So I just had to go on.

\\On the flip side of that, what has been the low point of your career so far? Any horror stories?

\\Probably the most horrible thing I had to do didn't have anything to do with music -- it was just something I had to do to make money. I was trying to get out of the town that I went to high school in, Carbondale, Ill. A friend of mine found me this job at a vivarium -- it's a place where they keep laboratory animals. My job was to clean up after them. I had to move loads and loads of rats. You had to pick the rat up by the base of the tail so he couldn't whip around and bite you -- which usually meant that he'd shit on your thumb -- and then drop him in a clean tray. So that was my job -- to pick up rats and move them to their nice new homes, about twice a week.

\\And the guinea pigs! I had to feed them too, and oh god ... yeech. You don't want to know ... I did that for probably two or three ye