The first time I interviewed Christine Lavin, it was 1990, and she was calling me from a pay phone on the streets of New York City. In Times Square. During rush hour, no less.

See, she knew the interview was scheduled, but at the last minute she had to run out to the Fed Ex office to ship off some album-cover artwork to her record company, but then she got distracted by…..Well, the scenario doesn’t sound much different than the ones she has often unspooled in some of her more amusing songs and discursive on-stage stories.

And, as if the Times Square backdrop wasn’t noisy enough, not long into that interview, a car alarm erupted on the street behind her, which we endured for a few minutes before she turned and yelled “Shut uuuuuuuuuuuuup!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” at the offending vehicle.

“I remember that!,” says Christine Lavin today. “That’s one good thing about moving out of the city; I don’t have to put up with car alarms going off all night long any more.”

Lavin recently moved in with her 90-year-old mother, in upstate New York, to look after her.

“Mom’s been having some health problems, just age-related stuff, and some short-term memory issues,” says Lavin. “I have eight brothers and sisters, but I’m the only one who is single, so I am happy to be able to take care of her. I don’t have kids, but now I feel very maternal toward my mom. And she may have memory problems, but she beats me at Scrabble all the time!”

This year, Lavin is celebrating her 25th anniversary — that is, 2010 marks 25 years since she was able to quit her day job and make a living from performing and recording. “I quit that day job at the very end of 1984, so ’85 was my first full year of devoting myself to making music full-time,” says the always-effusive Lavin.

And she’s celebrating that anniversary in multi-media fashion — with both an autobiography and a “25th Anniversary Concert” tour, which comes to The Ark on Saturday. Given that the show is a career overview, Lavin is making sure that, each night, her set list includes some of her most-requested songs. (Lavin will also do a performance, book signing and Q&A on Friday night at the Barnes & Noble store on Washtenaw.)

Not that she performs the same set list, or even the same songs, every night. “But a lot of nights, I’m doing things like ‘Regretting What I Said,’ or ‘Sensitive New Age Guys’ or ‘Good Thing He Can’t Read My Mind’,” says Lavin during a phone interview from a studio in New York City, where she is recording the audio-book version of her autobiography.

Those songs are definitely among Lavin’s breadwinners — the ones that first put her on the folk-pop map in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when she became one of the most beloved figures on the new-folk scene.

“And some nights I’m also doing things that I hardly every do, like, ‘The Kind of Love You Never Recover From’ — another Lavin-fan favorite, but one that she says is “a very emotional song for me to sing, which is why I rarely perform it.

“But I’m always writing, so I’m also including some new songs,” she says — and some not-quite-new-but-still-recent ones, like some of the songs from her 2009 album, “Cold Pizza For Breakfast.” That disc has nine new songs on it, plus a few re-recordings of older songs. And one track, “Good Thing SHE Can’t Read My Mind: a Dude’s Eye View,” was recorded live at The Ark last June. Listen to Christine Lavin "Attractive Stupid People" (MP3).

That turnabout-is-fair-play re-working of “Good Thing He Can’t Read My Mind” has “actually become more popular than the original version!,” chirps Lavin, almost in disbelief. The album also includes a re-recording of “The Kind of Love You Never Recover From.”

But the track Lavin feels most strongly about is “Mencken’s Pen,” during which she recites some of the writings of the legendary H.L. Mencken. “It took me 10 months of back and forth before I was able to get permission to use his words, even though I just recite them, I don’t even sing them. It almost didn’t make it onto the album, but I’m glad it did, because I love his work.”

The disc also includes a 17-minute-long reading from the aforementioned autobiography, “Cold Pizza For Breakfast: A Mem-wha??,” which will be published on June 1.

The book chronicles her career as a performer, recording artist and songwriter, and even jumps back in time to when she took piano lessons as a child. While Lavin is certainly known as a writer of witty, sometimes hilarious songs, she is a multi-faceted writer who can also pierce the heart with a heart-fluttering lament about lost love. So, despite her live-wire personality, the book isn’t wall-to-wall amusing anecdotes.

“I just wrote what happened, in my life,” says Lavin. “I didn’t embellish anything, or try to embroider or exaggerate for the sake of making the story funnier. I think folk music, at its core, is generally about telling the truth, and that’s what I wanted to do.

“I do talk about having been engaged, but I don’t include the person’s name, because he’s still a working performer, but people who know my work, and who know about the folk-music scene of the last 20 years, will be able to figure out who it is.”

At the end of the book, Lavin includes a list of the Top 1000 songs she has played on her XM radio show, “Slipped Discs,” and “I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from people saying how much they appreciate that, because it helped turn them on to artists that they otherwise might not have been familiar with.

“People have been suggesting to me for a long time that I write a book, and one guy I know, who is in the music-theater world, wants to turn my songs into a musical, and he suggested I write some narrative so that the musical would have a story.

“Based on the pre-orders, the response to the book so far has been very good, so I’m hopeful about the musical, but we’ll see how the book does once it’s out.”

Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.