British chanteuse Marianne Faithfull says her latest show, which pulls into the Mod Club Theatre on Monday night (a venue change from the Guvernment) -- will reflect her 40-year-plus career.

For fans of Before The Poison, her latest album, which features collaborations with critical favourites PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, this is not great news, although some of the new material will be represented.

For the Faithfull faithful, however, the chance to hear older classics like her cover of The Rolling Stones' As Tears Go By -- her breakthrough hit in 1964 -- it's music to their ears.

"I don't feel I have to do every song from the new record live," says Faithfull, 58, down the line from Paris. "Having already toured in Europe, I know what really works, and it's a mixture. I've been working 41 years now; that's a hell of a lot of songs. I'm trying to do something from every one of my records. I just think it's important to celebrate that. There's a lot of interesting stuff there and I'm trying to cover it. I can't please everybody, obviously. I have to start by pleasing myself and hoping that that will please other people too. I just can't do everything. The show would have to be hours long."

Faithfull's cabaret-friendly, world-weary persona and soul-searching music has always seemed somewhat more suited to Europeans' taste.

"I always complain a bit that I'm not so much in the consciousness of the people in North America, but that's not really true," she says. "Because obviously I'm just not (making music) in a highly, highly, commercial way, and that's fine. It's meant to be like that. A Marianne Faithfull concert is meant to be an event. And it's meant to be special. It's not meant to be routine at all. It's not meant to be an everyday pop thing."

The fact that Faithfull is even making her way to Canadian soil -- her North Americn tour begins tomorrow night in Boston -- is somewhat of a miracle, given her worrisome collapse last December before a concert in Milan.

She was immediately ordered to rest for three months and told the Sun back in January that she was feeling fine.

"I had a little convulsion," she said then. "It wasn't anything that major, but it meant that I had to stop."

Still, there's a noticeable change in tone between Faithfull's last 2002 album, the sexually charged Kissin' Time, which featured collaborations with younger male artists such as Beck, Billy Corgan, Dave Stewart, Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn, and Before The Poison, which was recorded in 2003.

Faithfull says she was affected by the events of 9/11.

"Kissin' Time was a very optimstic, jolly album, for me, and then all that terrible stuff happened with the World Trade Center and that affected me," she says. "I couldn't write an album like Kissin' Time. It just wouldn't happen."

But after listening to many of the new songs, you get the sense that Faithfull is writing about a failed relationship. She insists the subject matter is all a big mystery.

"I'm not sure what they're about," she says. "I know what I'm writing about when I'm writing it, but I never really know sometimes, for years, what it's really about."

For those keeping track, the new album cover -- featuring the singer reclining on a couch with a little girl (a model who came with her parents to one of Faithfull's Paris shows) resting on her lap -- it's significant.

"It means several things," says Faithfull. "One of them is that I'm not alone, which is the first time I've ever been in a picture on a record where I'm not on my own. And, of course, the other thing is how I feel about everything. About all the things that have been going on and what are you going to do about these very little people? I feel like it's the future that I'm talking about."