Shawn Colvin doesn’t need radio play these days to sustain a healthy career. Her 1996 CD, A Few Small Repairs, gave Colvin her first pop radio hit, with the song “Sunny Came Home,” and two Grammies, for song and record of the year. But even if she’s not shooting for the charts with her latest records, she has already built enough of a loyal audience to assure that she can draw a crowd on tour and sell a fair number of albums.

Colvin began building her career in New York City, where in the mid-1980s she began playing her original material in clubs. Eventually, she was signed by Columbia Records, releasing her debut album, Steady On, in 1989, which picked up a Grammy for best contemporary folk recording.

She continued to pick up more fans as she released 1992’s Fat City and 1994’s Cover Girl. Three records followed on the Grammy-winning Repairs: 1998’s Holiday Songs and Lullabies, featuring illustrations by Maurice Sendak; 2001’s Whole New You, which Colvin now refers to disparagingly as her “pop” record, and which she feels suffered from the pressure to create another hit single; and her most recent, 2006’s These Four Walls.

These Four Walls marks a return for Colvin to a more stripped back, acoustic-centric sound. That back-to-basics approach works well for a performer like Colvin, whose lyrics and sweet, youthful vocals have always been primary attractions for her music.

The new songs work, of course, because Colvin and producer John Leventhal once again marry compelling lyrics to strong and unencumbered melodies. Most of the material is fairly delicate and musically melancholy, although “Tuff Kid” and “The Bird” rock a bit and a couple of tunes, “Fill Me Up” and “Let It Slide,” have some of the breeziness of Whole New You.

Colvin openly admits her songwriting on These Four Walls isn’t as personal or autobiographical as on earlier albums. And she is happy to say she wouldn’t want it any other way.

“When I was younger, I was much more prone to take the drama and the discomfort in my life and express it in my lyrics and the music,” said Colvin, a single mother with an 8-year-old daughter. “It was a real outlet. That just doesn’t [happen as much], there’s less drama, for one thing.”

That doesn’t mean Colvin’s writing has become boring. She remains a talented lyricist, capable of creating emotionally evocative portraits of people and situations and honing in on emotions and desires that go to the core of the human experience.

And Colvin still doesn’t shy away from personal territory when she thinks it’s appropriate. In fact, one of her new songs, “Tuff Kid,” may be as thorny as any song Colvin has written, to the point where it has caused some tensions, particularly with her mother.

It’s little wonder. “Tuff Kid” centers on Colvin’s difficult relationship with her parents, who struggled to understand and know how to deal with the artist’s temperament that Colvin showed even as a young child.

One verse is particularly telling:

“My mama had me / But she didn’t get me / I guess I broke her at the age of 5 / My daddy hit me / But he couldn’t quit me / We showed each other how to feel alive.”

Colvin admits she wrestled with whether to release “Tuff Kid” before deciding many fans might identify with the song’s central themes of parental turmoil and the need to find a nurturing refuge among friends.

“My father and I made peace about things a long time ago, and my mother doesn’t like the world to know our business,” Colvin said. “And you know, it’s hurtful to her. It’s questionable, my doing this. It is, and I can’t really defend it. When I do a piece of work like that, I feel on some level, it’s not so specific, I just feel tons of people can relate to that, this feeling [of being] alienated for certain reasons in their own home when they’re teenagers or whatever. Their friends are their salvation. That’s why they connect to [them]. That’s who understands them. And everything’s in there.

“My mother didn’t get me,” Colvin said. “She did not. I baffled her. And my father was really the one that I related to more. But unfortunately, he had this little problem. He dealt with his anger badly. Anyway, those are my crosses to bear that made me angry and drove me to seek solace in my friends. I was angry. And a lot of my friends were angry. That’s just a portrait of a situation, and I just don’t think it’s unusual.”