elle magazine article, september '96
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From ELLE Magazine, September 1996 edition, page 131
How She Changed Her Tune When unsuspecting listeners hear the richly nuanced pop and par lor jazz of Suzanne Vega's new album, Nine Objects of desire (A&M), they may find it difficult to believe that this cool chanteuse is the same waifish singer-song writer behind "Luka," the harrowing 1987 ballad about an abused child. All they're likely to recognize are her dark lyrics and insinuating voice. "I suppose my new songs are a bit more adventurous," Vega says with char acteristic nonchalance. "'Caramel' is supposed to sound like a bossa nova tune from the '60s. 'Birthday' is probably the heaviest thing I've ever done. Some of the stuff is based on the grooves. There's one love song ['World Before Columbus'], but we distorted the vocal to distance it from the sort of things I used to do." Of course, the sort of things the thirty-seven-year-old Vega used to do -- the gritty-elegy-with-the-powerful-message that elevated her from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid-'80s -- succeeded in transcending the image of the female singer-songwriter as bandanna-clad, summer-of-love naif, and introduced a new generation to the music that landed Joan Baez on the cover of Time in 1962. "I wanted to be a folksinger," Vega explains. "When I was fourteen, I used to listen to Woody Guthrie and write songs about living on freight trains. As I got older, I realized I didn't know a thing about freight trains -- I'm from New York City." In 1992, after a two-year layoff, she released a fourth album, the underrated 99.9 F (probably best known for the disquieting, AIDS-influenced "Blood Makes Noise"). Vega's tales of the city blended folk narratives with industrial noise and Latin rhythms (drawn from her childhood in Spanish Harlem) and gave birth to post-modern folk. Though Vega isn't entirely comfortable with the "folk" label, she's hardly disowning it: "Folk is part of American culture," she says. "It's mostly about storytelling, not acoustic guitars and tie-dye. I wanted to be a mix of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed; they're all great storytellers. I learned by playing solo at folk festivals. If you can win over a festival audience, you can pretty much work anywhere." submitted by unique212@aol.com |
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