In the offices of a record company on Paris's Left Bank, Souad Massi is trying to explain why she is "a complicated person, and not happy". On the face of it, she has everything. It's only six years since she fled from Algeria, and in that time she has established herself as a major celebrity in France, with a growing global following. For the west, at least, she is now surely not just the best-known female singer from North Africa but from the Arabic-speaking world. Her last album, Deb (Heartbroken), sold 200,000 copies, and she'll no doubt win even more of a following if a planned duet with Paul Weller goes ahead. It's something she's keen to do - "I thought he was black when I heard his voice"- but was delayed, she said, because she was pregnant. Now, her six-week-old daughter Yngy (emerald in Persian) is being cared for in the next room, as Massi explains why the songs on her new album, Mesk Elil (Honeysuckle), are once again so exquisitely sad.
"I don't know how to answer - I'm a very melancholy person, and I don't know why. I have happy moments, but I'm melancholy ... I don't know if it's because of the life I've led up to now. Even in Algeria with my family I had a solitary side. I didn't have an easy childhood, and then came the civil war. It all leaves traces ..." She laughs - "Maybe I like it that way."
Massi's gently melodic tristesse is matched with a musical style that turns all previous concepts of Algerian music upside-down. Her songs are a world away from Algeria's best-known pop style, Rai, and though she sings mostly in Arabic, her early work was a North African answer to Joan Baez or Françoise Hardy. Here was a girl with long black hair and jeans, and a powerful, intimate voice, playing acoustic guitar and singing about exile and tragic love affairs. Of course the French loved her. An appearance in 1999 at the Femmes d'Algérie women's festival soon after her arrival in Paris was followed by broadcasts on the adventurous Radio Nova and then a major record contract. It would be hard to imagine British labels showing similar bravery.
Since then, she has acquired an excellent band, and mixed the gentle ballads with anything from Arabic styles and flamenco to sturdy pop anthems with a North African edge. The new album shows her moving on again. There are sections recorded with an orchestra, a reminder, she says, that she started out studying western classical music in Algiers, "and I was listening to cello music when I was pregnant".
The best orchestral track, the tragic Denia Wezmen, echoes a very different tradition, and was, she says, inspired by Mohamed Abdel Wahab, the celebrated Egyptian producer and arranger who mixed Arabic with Latin influences in his work for the legendary singer Oum Kalthoum.
Then there are other African influences, with the appearance of various members of Salif Keita's band. The Malian singer was mixing his new album in an adjoining studio. "He and his band came in to listen every night, and then to playa" explains Massi.
Her own ancestry dates back to the Berbers who already lived in North Africa before the Arab invasions. The new album includes one song, Ilham, that she sings "in Arabic, but in the Berber style - more like Malian music and the music of black Africa". It's a complex, unlikely mix that reflects all the different styles she heard growing up in Algeria. "I started at school with classical music, then flamenco, then rock. And then there was Berber music, chaabi and rai. And country and western on the radio."
She learned to play guitar during the violent years of the civil war, sparked by the cancellation of the 1992 elections, which it seemed that the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front might win.
"It was a difficult time, with the curfews, and it seemed like an act of provocation for a woman to go out on the street carrying a guitar case. I had to prepare myself every time, because I was timid, and strangers would follow me and the fundamentalists would insult me." Even so, she built up a local reputation with her singing, although her songs were banned from the radio. When she started receiving anonymous phone calls, she decided to leave. "It could have been a serious threat or just someone who was jealous of me, but I was frightened."
The new album includes songs of nostalgia and longing for Algeria, although she was able to return last year to visit her family. Her songs are no longer banned in her homeland, but these days simply being an Algerian has brought problems elsewhere. "I was on my way to play in Tahiti back in March, and went through Los Angeles in transit. They stopped me for two days, even though I had a work permit for America. They asked me what I thought about Americans, and whether I had come to kill the president. At first I thought it was a joke, but that was a bad mistake. But my husband is Moroccan and he has an even harder time."
So what does it mean to her, being one of the best-known female performers from the Islamic world? "I'm a Muslim, but not practising. I don't veil myself and I wear jeans. I don't think I can speak for Muslim women, but it's good to get rid of the cliches, and show that we're not all terrorists - or Rai singers."
· Mesk Elil is released by Wrasse on October 31. Souad Massi plays the Marquee, London, on November 23, and tours the UK early next year
