There's always been a little more to Nancy Sinatra than meets the eye.

Even back in the '60s, when she was a pop star with a famous father, a sassy persona and a handful of kitschy, kick-ass hit songs, Sinatra embodied an intriguing mixture of good-girl conformity and bad-girl rebelliousness. One moment she was demurely singing Somethin' Stupid on TV variety shows with her dad; the next she was threatening to walk all over a lover with thigh-high boots, or drowsily invoking Euripides' sexually twisted Phaedra character in her disturbing duet with Lee Hazlewood, Some Velvet Morning.

It was a potent, complicated mix, and Frank's little girl soon became a pinup for both nascent riot grrrls and homesick American GIs in Vietnam.

Like many '60s icons, Sinatra faded from the public eye in the '70s, when she took time off to raise her two daughters. She has continued to perform and record sporadically in the intervening decades, but it's the release of her new, self-titled album on Tuesday that seems destined to bring Nancy Sinatra back to larger-than-life status.

Nancy Sinatra is a collection of collaborations with a startlingly diverse group of contemporary musicians, including Morrissey, U2's Bono and The Edge, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, alt-country band Calexico, The E Street Band's Little Steven Van Zandt, Jon Spencer, Pete Yorn and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

As it turns out, the impressive list of contributors originated with Sinatra's daughter A.J. Lambert and son-in-law Matt Azzarto, who play in a rock band called Rocket.

"They produced the album, and it was A.J.'s concept," Sinatra explains. "She just felt that I was doing the wrong music, and that I should get together with the people who really appreciate me. At first I was doubtful, but as time went on and I saw that people were responding, I thought it might work."

Although it was A.J.'s idea, Sinatra says she was familiar with all her collaborators' music -- and already counted Morrissey as a friend.

"If you want to stay in the business, you have to pay attention to what's going on out there," she says. "I'd known all of them -- that was part of the criteria. I had to be sure.

"You know, you take a gamble when you ask someone to send you a song. You have to know that you're approaching the right person. Imagine if someone had sent in a song that was dreadful to me. I would have had to hurt their feelings and say I couldn't do it. But since I did know these people as musicians, I felt pretty secure.

"And then Morrissey sent me his song (Let Me Kiss You, which also appears on his new album, You Are The Quarry) independently. We hadn't talked to him about it, he just happened to time it right. And I thought, well, this must mean something -- it's a sign."

The songs are as varied as the collaborators -- from Morrissey's wistful Let Me Kiss You to Calexico's spaghetti western Burnin' Down The Spark to Little Steven's soulful pop song Baby Please Don't Go and U2's piano bar closer Two Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad. And since they sent in more or less finished tracks, there wasn't one band to give the album a consistent sound. Still, Sinatra's distinctive voice, which doesn't seem to have changed much in 30 years, holds it all together.

"That's one concern I had, 'cause when you get such an eclectic group of musicians, you may not have a cohesive collection," she says. "But I think it works."

Sinatra has yet to tour in support of the new album, but she did perform a couple of its tracks at Little Steven's Underground Garage Festival in New York last month.

"I kind of felt like a fish out of water, but the audience was very sweet and receptive," she recalls, "and didn't seem to mind that I could be their grandmother. We had a great time.

"I questioned Steven early on about whether I fit in with the garage rock thing, and he said, 'Hell, yeah -- you were responsible for a lot of it!' He was sweet. I tend to be self-deprecating, and for me to accept something like that is not easy. But I did want to do it, and whole day was brilliant."

Sinatra still looks great at 64 -- she did a Playboy pictorial less than a decade ago -- but please don't ask her to dress up in her trademark boots and miniskirt anymore.

"You know, I had to give all that up a while back," she says. "You have to be age appropriate."

And if she had worried that her young collaborators might want her to rehash classics like These Boots Are Made For Walkin' or How Does That Grab You Darling, she was pleasantly surprised at their ideas for her.

"The interesting thing is that not all the artists saw me in the same light," she says. "Which is okay with me, because my albums weren't all about that tough-girl persona -- I did standards and stuff. And the musicians who really knew my music, like (Calexico's) Joey Burns and Thurston Moore, knew how to capture different facets of the personality that's there on record. It was fascinating to see that -- to see me coming back at me. I didn't realize I was that multifaceted!"

One rather odd facet was tapped by Moore for Momma's Boy.

"Isn't it creepy?" she asks in delight. "And we made it even more creepy, because originally we had a regular vocal on it, and I said to A.J., 'Let me try a breathier take and see what happens.' And the breathier vocal is what made it."

U2's contribution was Two Shots Of Happy, One Shot Of Sad, a finished track written about Nancy's father Frank.

"They graciously gave me the multi-track to put my voice on," she explains, "and the agreement was that we wouldn't use any of Bono's voice, because it would make the song cockeyed. He sang it in the first person, I sing it in the third person -- it wouldn't have worked. But we had trouble finding instrumental tracks that didn't have his vocal on them, 'cause it sort of leaked into all the tracks. Sadly, the upshot was that we couldn't use anything from the original except bass and drums, so we added two guitars and a piano."

Ultimately, though, it's Pulp's Jarvis Cocker who seems to have captured the essence of classic Nancy. The Britpop genius submitted Don't Let Him Waste Your Time and Baby's Coming Back To Me, two originals that sound as though they could have been sung by Sinatra herself 40 years ago.

"Jarvis is brilliant," she says. "Those songs are just so me. I don't know how he did it -- it's kismet, I guess. It's a thrill that he knew my music well enough. And without effort, it seemed. Jarvis and (Pulp guitarist) Richard Hawley came over and stepped into a strange studio with strange new equipment and people they'd never met before, including me, and they captured some kind of magic. They took the tracks back to Liverpool and worked on them. Richard added horns and things. And the tracks were stolen from the studio, which is kind of tragic because the horn parts didn't make it.

"It's funny -- each song has such a story behind it. The people who wrote the songs did the tracks for the most part, and we added instruments here and there and vocals, of course. But these people really went above and beyond the call to get this done. It was quite a labour of love."