With her blue-gray eyes, peachy complexion, and half-pout of a smile, Suzanne Vega scarcely fits the image projected by her early songs. "Luka," her hit about an abused child, makes us think of tearful figures in black. But lately, with an acoustic guitar on her lap and percussion in her head, Vega's blend of folk and pop music is moving in exciting new directions. Her recent album, 99.9F, integrates complicated lyrics with an assortment of unique sounds and rhythms. "I think I relaxed and allowed more of my personality to come out," she says. The album, Vega's fifth, reflects a childhood spent in East Harlem and on New York's Upper West Sids. Now thirty-three, she grew up without knowing her real father; he ran off before she was born. The following year, her midwestern mother, Pat, married Puerto Rican novelist Ed Vega, and the couple had three more children. "I was proud to be Puerto Rican... until I realized I was white. That was confusing."
By fourteen, Vega was strumming a guitar in Greenwich Village coffeehouses; at sixteen she had already written fifty songs. As a major in modern dance at the famed High School for the Performing Arts, "I was pretty driven," she recalls. "I wanted to be a dancer ,artist, or some kind of performer." Inspired by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Laura Nyro ("I loved the way she wrote about New York City"). Vega studied English at Barnard College, and in 1985 - three years after graduation - she landed a recording contract and her first album on A & M Records.
One particularly personal cut on 99.9F, entitled "Blood Makes Noise," is about how the songwriter finally met her biological father after hiring a private detective to locate him six years ago. "He was interested in me, because I was his daughter and because I was a musician on the road," she says. "For some reason he thought I was married and had kids and was living in Florida. It turned out his mother had been a musician on the road too. She'd played drums in an all-girl band in the thirties and forties, had four kids and couldn't afford to keep all of them, so she gave my father up for adoption. It's weird the way the whole thing repeated itself." No doubt Vega will captivate us with more of her dramatic life story in song hits to come
Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski
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