"I love my early hits. . . . I'm so proud of them and I've reinvented them."

Carly Simon, 62, releases "This Kind of Love," her first album of original material in eight years, on Tuesday. We reached the famed singer-songwriter (and new grandmother) at her property on Martha's Vineyard, where her main worry involved a dying sheep.

-- Melinda Newman

Jackie Onassis once asked you to write an autobiography and you said no. Any thoughts of returning to it?

Gosh, I would love to. . . . I'm sure that there will come a time when I'll be able to be more still and not care about whether there's new gravel in the driveway where it's a pit now. At this moment, I'm worrying about whether I should provide euthanasia for my sheep, who is so old. She's going to die and she's just kind of on the ground. That preoccupies a lot of my time.

On the album, you cover a pair of songs written by your two children with James Taylor. What is the best gift your children ever gave you?

I remember a tape that they made for me when I was going into surgery to have a mastectomy, and it could be played all during the operation. They would just take turns [saying], "I love you so much, Mom. You can do it. You're in safe hands. This is going to be fine."

On her MySpace page, your longtime friend Hillary Clinton says that her last music purchase was [Simon's 2007 album] "Into White." Did she really have to buy a copy?

Oh, I gave it to her. I don't think she forgot that I'd given it to her; it was probably the interviewer who got it slightly wrong. I had given her and President Clinton a copy when I had done a little fundraiser for her in Nantucket. . . . She did not buy it, but it's flattering to think that she did buy it and stuff it in, you know, into her purse, saying, "I gotta listen to this!"

In a recent Madonna interview she said she can't ever imagine singing "Like a Virgin" again unless someone offered her $30 million. Do you feel that way about any of your early hits?

No, I love my early hits. . . . I'm so proud of them and I've reinvented them now because I can't necessarily sing that hard anymore without hurting my voice. Now I have a new version of "You're So Vain," which is so fun.

[As part of a charity auction a few years ago, Simon told the winning bidder, television executive Dick Ebersol, whom "You're So Vain" is about.] Is it time to let someone besides Dick Ebersol know?

Oh God, please don't make me go through this. . . . The thing is now, if I wanted to have fun with it, I could say it's just about anybody.

Did you tell Ebersol the truth?

Yes, I did. And there were people with him, too, and I didn't like that he brought people with him [to the auction]. But I said, listen, you absolutely have to go along with this: If I ever hear this come back to me, I am going to say it's not true.