In the beginning of the great Singer-Songwriter Revival -- so the common wisdom goes -- there was Suzanne Vega. Along with another extremely unlikely breakthrough artist of the late 80's, Tracy Chapman, Vega helped clear a forgotten path from the coffeehouses to the major labels -- even to pop radio. Not even the most optimistic folkie could have guessed that one of their progeny would turn a snappy tune about an abused child ("Luka") and another about morning coffee at the local diner ("Tom's Diner") into international hits. Vega's success gave the acoustic guitar-slinging masses hope that their voices could indeed be heard again.

Several years and albums later, Suzanne Vega holds her place as one of the pop world's most unlikely stars -- and one of the hardest to pin down.

Although she clearly helped crack open the industry doors to the singer-songwriter army, no one sounds much like her; the arresting combination of her little-girl vocal style, staccato melodies, and enigmatic but poetically charged lyrics remains her own. Last year's release of _99.9F_ (all her albums are on A&M) propelled her further away from the pack, highlighting the uniqueness of her contribution to the singer-songwriter idiom and pointing toward lots more interesting music to come.

"I've had a strange career," Vega commented on the phone from her New York apartment in late fall, "because it's sort of been a process of growing up in public, as it were. The first album [_Suzanne Vega_] did much better than anyone thought it would, and the second album [_Solitude Standing_] was a big hit, so everyone took each album very seriously. The third one [_Days of Open Hand_] was taken the most seriously of all."

Serious in what way? I asked. "Everyone felt that it had to be technically clean and up to a certain standard, that the playing had to be good, and that the sound had to be very pristine," she said. "There wasn't any feeling of, let's be radical or let's twist this. . . . Actually, [coproducer] Lenny Kaye was the subversive element on the first and second records, but even so, the overall quality of the sound was always really good. There's certainly nothing wrong with that, but on this album [_99.9F_] that wasn't what we were going for. We were going for deliberate distortion and a more playful kind of feeling." For Vega, making the album was a liberating experience. In her words, "It was like, finally you get to go out and roll around in the dirt without always having to be cleaned up for Sunday."

The songs on _99.9F_ spin on a kaleidoscope of acoustic guitar, percussion, electric bass, and unusual keyboard effects, interspersed with some of the quiet fingerpicking meditations that are more reminiscent of Vega's previous albums. The album's heavily rhythmic, sometimes psychedelic quality was a surprise to Vega herself. "I had intended to make this album a straightforward acoustic album," she said. "I wanted the acoustic guitar to be the center of most of the songs, and I'd say it is the center on 10 out of the 12 songs -- there are two songs that have no acoustic guitar. I wanted them to be the kind of songs that I could sing alone, because I found with _Days of Open Hand_ that I actually was starting to play less and less guitar, and I was starting to experiment with the Fairlight [a computer-based sampler, synthesizer, and recording system], which I didn't really like as much as I thought I was going to."

For the new album, Vega was slated to work with renowned producer Mitchell Froom, and before the recording sessions she listened to and enjoyed many albums that he had produced -- mostly hard-hitting rock'n'roll by Crowded House, Richard Thompson, and others. She had some new material written when they first met, but she felt inspired to rise to the challenge of working with him, so she wrote a slew of new songs in the first week of preproduction.

"I was aware that I had a reputation for being sort of ethereal -- wan and frail and melancholy," she said, "and it was worrying me that it was all going to sound like one color. So I pushed myself a little bit to write songs like 'When Heroes Go Down' and to use more major chords than I would have normally, and mix them with minor and augmented chords. I wanted to have a balanced collection of songs."

Froom had definite ideas about how Vega's songs could be dressed up differently than on her previous albums. as she put it, "Mitchell likes eccentricity, and when he works with an artist he'll find out what's different about them and then bring those qualities out, rather than making them conform to his idea."

Vega also wasn't working with her normal band for the sessions. "My band used to like a certain structure, and if I wrote a song with no bridge they used to be annoyed at this and would want to have a bridge; whereas Mitchell was very happy if things were uneven or not symmetrical or if there weren't any bridge -- that was fine. He has his own idea of the way the music should flow. So that may be another reason why these songs may sound more innovative, because Mitchell sort of let them be as they were.

He didn't clean them up or force them into any particular form."

Some of the results of their collaboration include "Fat Man and Dancing Girl," a funky talking-singing tune with a distinctly Beatles-esque bridge written by Froom; "When Heroes Go Down," a piece that Vega identifies as Elvis Costello-inspired "acerbic pop"; and the Gulf War requiem "Song of Sand," recorded with guitar, voice, and string quartet. Vega said she and Froom agreed to "take small details and blow them up and distort them, which, in a way, is the way I write songs: I take small details of a situation and I blow them up, and usually the situations themselves are kind of distorted."

Even though the final mixes are a long way from a "straightforward acoustic album," Vega said she and Froom tried not to bury the tunes in production.

"We were really careful to keep the whole thing scaled down to my guitar and my vocals, because Mitchell said he felt like I have a small voice and there is no reason for me to be playing with a large drum kit and competing against all this racket, competing with all the large, more anthemic types of sounds."

Most of Vega's songs emerge from solitary sessions with her Martin 000-45, with the exception of a few tunes like "Blood Makes Noise" or "Tom's Diner" that "jump into my mind whole," she said, with no guitar part in sight.

"What I really love is just to sit with the guitar in my arms and fool around with it. 'In Liverpool' got started because I was trying to teach myself an Elvis Costello song called 'Almost Blue,' and I had just taken the first three chords, and then that gave me an idea and I started going off on that." Although Vega quickly pointed out that she plays on guitar "whatever gives me the least trouble," her guitar parts are always well-crafted, full of interesting voicings, and cleanly played. Like everything in her music, her guitar adds in just the necessary notes, nothing more.

After 22 years of playing, she said, her guitar parts emerge spontaneously. "I guess at this point I've built up a vocabulary of stuff I like, so I just kind of run around the fretboard doodling. . . . Usually it's just finding a pattern and then repeating the pattern up and down the fretboard. I don't know enough about the technique or the theory of it to know really what I'm doing, but I know what quality a chord will have. I like the ones that sound more mysterious, but lately I've been trying to mix those with very straightforward happy chords or very straightforward sad ones."

Lately, Vega has also been trying to vary the guitar texture more, mixing strummed songs with fingerstyle songs (for which she uses a thumbpick and fingernails). "The problem is that when I'm playing alone in my living room, I hate strumming because there's no reason to strum, so I tend to get more intimate and I fingerpick," she said. "Then I go onstage and I find that the things that tend to go across better are the strummed ones. [They are] less exhausting. It's very satisfying to be able to punch some of those songs out." As examples, she mentioned strummers like "Neighborhood Girls" (from _Suzanne Vega_), "When Heroes Go Down" and "Rock in This Pocket" (both from _99.9F_). When playing "As A Child" (_99.9F_) alone, she said she does a "bizarre sort of Bo Diddley thing" that Froom vetoed in the studio because all her strings were ringing out. (David Hidalgo got the nod for that part.) "So I have to tighten up my Bo Diddley," she added with a laugh.

I asked if she's ever experimented with alternate tunings. "Other people have suggested that I might want to, since I seem to like those kinds of chords," she said. "But I find it very distracting, and I find it difficult enough to play the guitar the way it is. If I change one string, I'm lost -- I can't find my way back to the tonic root."

Unlike many songwriters, Vega writes melodies that aren't strictly bound to her guitar progressions -- they have a life of their own (and in her spoken-word tunes, she leaves the guitar harmony behind entirely). "With this last album I was attempting to sing more definite melodies," she said. "My pattern in the past has been to repeat something; if I like it I'll just repeat it over and over again, without realizing that I can extend it. 'In Liverpool,' for example, is a very different kind of melody for me, because it's long -- it's a long phrase. It has a different kind of quality than the songs I usually write."

Central to the impact of Vega's songs is the precise matching of all their components: the guitar, vocal, melody, and lyrics all share a minimalist, sculpted quality. I asked her if all these qualities developed naturally, or if she consciously matched and shaped them along the way. Vega approached the question from the lyrical side.

"I prefer short words to long ones, because I find that's the quickest way to get someone's attention," she said. "if you say, 'My name is Luka/ I live on the second floor,' you're drawn into this picture because it's such specific, concrete information and the language is so simple. But the funny thing was that two years ago I found out that I was an asthmatic -- I had never before been diagnosed as having asthma. When I mentioned this to my drummer, he laughed and said he figured there was a reason why I had such short phrases! I have short words, short phrases, and I don't stand around holding the note our to using any vibrato, because I can't -- I have no breath. I can't breathe! So I guess it's all developed in a way that suits my style. I mean it sounds kind of pathetic, but it isn't, really: it's just making the best of your own limitations, which is kind of what a style is. Developing a style means finding out where your limits are and making the best of them."

Vega elaborated on her approach to writing lyrics. "I'm usually writing about a very specific situation, and it seems to me that there is only one set of words that will tell the whole story, and no other set of words will do that. So it's almost like a code, a way of giving a lot of information in a short time. Plus, there are certain rules that I'm guiding myself by. The words have to sound a certain way. I like words that have a lot of consonants in them, that have certain hard sounds in them, like t's and k's. 'Luka' is a good word for me to sing; I like the way that word feels as opposed to other kinds of names."

In addition to sounding a certain way when sung, Vega's lyrics are also surprisingly forceful on paper. She said, "Part of the rule for me is that it has to read well. Although it can't just read well; it has to sing well first. If it reads well but doesn't sing well, I just get rid of it."

The difference between reading words and hearing them sung is, Vega said, "an emotional thing, really. Something will ring true on the page when you read it, and then you go to sing it and you feel really pretentious." She brought up the example of "When Heroes Go Down": "I was wondering about the word 'equivocate,' thinking, does this flip it over into some kind of pretentious realm? Then I found that when I sang it, it didn't. It was the word I meant, and it fit right there. Even though it was a long word, I felt that I shouldn't be afraid of using a long word once in a while; I can just stick this in here rather than trying to find another word. But [that decision] usually has to do with the feeling behind it, and whether I suspect myself of using jargon or taking the easy way out. If I suspect I've heard it before, or if I suspect I'm stealing from someone else, I try not to."

As a writer and performer, Vega considers very carefully the effect of her songs on the audience. Far from being the navel-gazing songwriter, gushing with confessions and personal details, she continually looks outside herself in her songwriting and rigorously tests the results.

"I think some of [my music] is introspective, but I make sure to have the songs relevant to everyone," she said. "I tend not to like the kinds of songs that are deliberately personal, and it really depends on how it's done. Leonard Cohen, for example; you listen to his music and you suspect that a lot of it is very personal and right out of his life, but for some reason the details that he puts in are universal ones. . . .

"It's important for me to acknowledge that you are writing for an audience, you're not just writing a page in a diary. You're writing for a bunch of people who don't know you; they're not your friends, they don't know what your life is like or who you're going out with, or maybe they don't even care. Most of those people are listening to you to see how you will relate to them, and that's something I always remember. They're not buying your record because they're interested in your personal problems; they're buying your record because they're interested in their own personal problems, and they hope that you have something to say to them."

Looking ahead, Vega said that the creative outburst that resulted in her last album has yet to run its course, and the collaboration with Froom may continue. In the meantime, she is heading out on tour in early '93 with a band that will reflect what she called the "attitude change" of _99.9F_, while continuing to play solo acoustic gigs to stay on top of her repertoire.

Ever since the _Suzanne Vega_ album, Vega's producers, her record company, and Vega herself have struggled with the tiresome label-that-music game, studiously avoiding the 'f' word that was considered a commercial albatross in the '80s. Perhaps because of the expectation-defying _99.9F_, Vega seems less concerned these days with being pigeonholed as a folksinger, although she expresses frustration that female musicians are still lumped in one category rather than judged on their individual merits.

"In terms of my own personal life, I think I've been influenced by a lot of different people," she said, citing Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, and Chrissie Hynde as kindred spirits. "But I'm aware that I'm perceived as a woman, singer-songwriter, acoustic guitar player, folksinger, for lack of a better word. And that's fine. I don't care what people define me as, because I'm always going to wiggle out of it. No matter what anyone says, I'm just going to do what I want anyway."

This much is clear: Suzanne Vega will always want -- and need -- to write songs. "I feel called into it in a specific way," she said. "I always felt that I had something specific to say and a very particular way of saying it. The goal of it was not to be popular and successful, but to say the thing as clearly and as accurately as I could."

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Submitted by Mark Bailey

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