Suzanne Vega was born prematurely and suffers from asthma. Listen to her songs and it shows. Her different tunes and nervy lyrics established the genre of the consumptive girl singer. Yet now Vega goes to the gym. And, Caroline Sullivan writes, her music's changing too. Portrait: Dirk Van Dooren.

BRONTE SISTER WITH AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR

Suzanne Vega says that rumours of her wanness are greatly exaggerated. The leading purveyor of pale bedsit pop contends that she has been consistently misunderstood. The world may construe her as diffident and droopy, but the singer insists she is made of robuster stuff.

"I've got a sense of humour, for heaven's sake," she says. She even has an emergency joke: "Did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a dog?" Her triumphant chortle implies that she rests her case.

But wit is not what is at issue here (anyone who has heard Vega banter with a concert audience knows she is acutely funny). What we are talking about is the bits between the badinage -- the music. Vega's understated glimpses into other people's lives are nothing if not limp-wristed (fans call them subtle).

The songs and their softly-spoken creator provoke amazingly animated reactions. Admirers swoon over the allegedly dark humour and sharp insights. Detractors counter by pointing out that it was Vega who influenced people like Tracy Chapman to strap on a guitar. Neither have they forgotten DNA's remix of Vega's Tom's Diner. Welded to a techno beat, the thing was irritation in excelsis.

Browsing through her work, it seems there is a case for the prosecution. Take Small Blue Thing, a tune on the 1985 debut LP, Suzanne Vega. It begins: "Today I am a small blue thing / Like a marble or an eye." One hopes she had the grace to blush when she wrote that. Or there is the title track of 1987's Solitude Standing: "She turns to me with her hand extended / Her palm is split with a flower, with a flame."

Granted, these examples are plucked out of context. They do not negate the fact that, when she is in the mood, Vega is a superb chronicler of urban life. Her street sketches are dazzling decoctions of Springsteen-style romanticism, Elmore Leonard-style grit and wholly Vega detachment. Ironbound, with its description of "Portuguese women on Avenue L", is one-such item. Neighborhood Girls, a nostalgic paean to a prostitute, is another.

How irksome, then, that the bulk of Vega's repertoire is of the little-blue-marble stripe. Worse, her success launched the genre of the consumptive girl singer. Suddenly every listless type prone to bouts of 3 am sleeplessness was writing songs and, more disturbingly, recording them.

Record labels have mined this fertile seam with various degrees of credibility. Most shocking was Tanita Tikaram, the 18-year-old wunderbard from Basingstoke. Tikaram once broodingly remarked: "Leonard Cohen -- how can anyone live without this man?" That one must haunt her.

The music-business enthusiasm for the melancholy-little-girl is still unchecked. The past few months alone have brought Tori Amos and Sophie B. Hawkins. Vega must consider herself to be generations removed from it all, but one trusts she feels penitent.

Having said that, it could be time for a reassessment of Suzanne Vega. Her fourth album, 99.9 oF, is a major departure for the Manhattan songwriter. Her passion for clean, economical arrangements has been superseded by a fascination with noises. 99.9 oF is vibrant with guitars and percussion and, for the first time, Vega projects to the back row. By anyone else's standards the record is a delicate, insular affair, but by Vega's standards it is practically speed metal. With the help of Elvis Costello / Crowded House producer Mitchell Froom, Vega has transformed herself from fey folkteuse to sophisticated rockiste.

"I just decided it was time to play about with some different music," Vega explains. It should be said that she does not look much like a nascent rock chick. Enveloped in a black dress that accentuates her slightness, she appears much younger than her 33 years. Her pallor suggests that no-one has ever had to warn her about staying out of the sun. With a different haircut, she could be a Bronte heroine.

It transpires that Vega's translucent look is due to ill health rather than artistic temperament. She was born prematurely and copes with congenital asthma and bronchitis. Somewhere along the way she also suffered whiplash and has had back problems ever since.

"It's only recently that I've begun to feel healthy," she discloses. "I've been working out at the gym and I'm more happy and mobile than I've ever been before. I can *do* stuff now. I took a train trip across America a while ago and I carried my own bags and got the bed down from the wall.

"Before, I always got winded easily. I was always tired. I felt it almost as a psychic thing. I used to get so angry at it that I'd punish myself by walking from home on 102nd Street to school on 42nd Street."

References to New York dot Vega's conversation. She is as inextricably identified with her city as those other quintessential Manhattanites, Lou Reed and Woody Allen. Unlike Reed and Allen, Vega is drained by the city's great synergism. Her exhaustion and consequent quiet apartness are the linchpins of her music.

Vega songs condense New York to a neighbourhood-sized morsel of avenues, diners and hookers. Her ability to bring it to life is her main talent.

"My mother was a Midwesterner and she married my Puerto Rican stepfather, which must have been a radical move in 1960," Vega says musingly. "I grew up uptown -- 102nd and Broadway, 109th Street." The place names are enunciated distinctly, like charms. "My mother had four kids before the age of 24 and I just remember pandemonium."

Suzanne's stepfather, Ed Vega, was a novelist and an intellectual. Suzanne's early years were informed by street fighting, Camus and existentialism. "I was quiet and I had trouble saying things. I was better at writing them down. I had a sense of something being missing, which I think was my father."

It is not surprising that she finds anger difficult to deal with. As a child, she expressed it physically: "If someone hit me, I hit back, hard." Today, she still has trouble "being angry verbally. I've thrown stuff. But I'm learning to use my mouth better. I was very much outside things when I was young, but it was on purpose.

"I developed a strong sense of my own uniqueness and I had this idea that everyone else is unique. That gets me in trouble sometimes, because I'll spend hours talking to some guy, thinking *he's* unique, and then I'll find out he isn't."

Do men feel protective toward her? "Sometimes. But mostly they think I'm sarcastic. It takes a long time before they get through the door."

Vega progressed from withdrawn child to intense adolescent. At the High School of Performing Arts, she studied dance -- a perverse choice, given her chronic fatigue -- and stepped out with a trombone student. The other boys found her intimidating. "I wasn't a big dater. I didn't have a reputation for being a good time. Guys knew if they talked to me we'd end up discussing religion or death or something. It wasn't till my early twenties that I developed social skills. I didn't realize that you don't go up to people at parties and tell them everything about yourself."

At 20, at the height of punk, Vega discovered folk music. She travelled downtown to Greenwich Village's legendary Folk City club. Drinking beer among the beards, she felt she had found her niche.

She channelled her intensity into songwriting and the rest has been platinum albums and a legion of imitators.

Committed Vegaphobes may find it difficult to hate the new album. At any rate, they won't be able to level charges of tweeness. The songs contain some of Vega's most striking imagery: blood, doctors, disease. The pictures they create are obscure and distressing. There is a sense that Vega is divulging secret secrets.

What is she on about? Bad Wisdom commences, ominously, "Mother, the doctor knows something is wrong". On Blood Makes Noise, Vega says, "I'd like to help you, doctor, but the din in my head, it's too much."

Suzanne is evasive. "It's for the listener to interpret." They all say that. She relents. "Bad Wisdom could be ("could be"? Doesn't she know?) about pregnancy or AIDS or anything. It's about a girl talking to her mother and being frustrated by not getting an answer. A lot of girls feel betrayed by their mothers because they can't talk to them. My mother thinks every girl will be able to relate to that song."

Your correspondent ventures that some of the music seems rather morbid. Vega claims that I am missing the humour, which is certainly true. "It's dry humour. The way things are handled, the perspective. Like in When Heroes Go Down, the way it blasts in and out." Oh, *that* humour.

Conspicuously absent from are thirtysomething topics like babies and aging. Vega says she would rather write about them when they happen.

"I think about death, but I ignore aging. I'm aware that I'm older and changing physically, but I don't mind. I've never defined myself as a pretty person because, for a long time, I wasn't. I'd rather have character, like Georgia O'Keeffe."

Vega has worked hard for the past year. She appeared at the 1991 WOMAD festival and contributed a song to the subsequent Sounds of WOMAD album. (Her offering, the 1985 LP track Some Journey, quails in the hearty company of Kanda Bongo Man and Toumari Diebate.) The recording of 99.9 oF consumed months. Now there are great gobs of promotion chores to surmount before she can go home and put on her cashmere dressing gown.

The dressing gown perfectly epitomises Vega's reserved nature. It is been her one big pop star extravagance to date. Modest as it (relatively) is, she still feels compelled to justify it. "I could've bought terry cloth, but I figured cashmere would last longer." She admits to a weakness for silk underwear. The woman is damnably likeable.

It's nearly 8 pm and Vega, who has tickets for the theatre, has missed the curtain. "Aaah," she shrugs in New Yorkese. She slips into a crusting leather jacket that must have been wrested from a Hell's Angel. As she wisps from the room, she seems smaller than ever. Not unlike a marble, in fact.

99.9 oF is released by A&M on September 7.

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Submitted by Steve Zwanger

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