Author: Karen O'Brien
Publisher: Virago
Year: 1995
ISBN 1 85381 805 4
Price: Nine pounds and ninety nine pence (UK sterling)
Artists featured: Carla Bley, Rosanne Cash, Sheila Chandra, Neneh Cherry, Angelique Kidjo, Evelyn Glennie, Nanci Griffith, Janis Ian, Monie Love, Kirsty MacColl, Yoko Ono, Jane Siberry, Tanita Tikaram, Moe Tucker, Suzanne Vega.

Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, California in 1959. She grew up in a Hispanic neighbourhood in New York City, believing she was half-Puerto Rican, until her novelist father told her that he was really her step-father, and that her biological father was white and had not seen her since she was a baby. This sparked something of an identity crisis, which eventually culminated in a reunion with her biological father almost twenty years later. She later discovered thwt her parental grandmother had also been a musician, a drummer with the Merry Makers' Ladies Orchestra in the US in the 1920s and '30s.

As a teenager, Suzanne Vega attended the High School of the Performing Arts (immortalised in the film/television series, "Fame"), where she studied dance. Teaching herself to play the guitar, she began to write songs, fuelled by discovering the music of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed. By the time she attended her first rock concert - a Lou Reed show - at the age of nineteen, she had abandoned her plans to become a dancer and, while at Barnard College, performed her own songs in student cafes and the folk clubs of Greenwich Village.

After leaving Barnard, she worked as a receptionist while gradually building up a strong following for her solo acoustic performamnes on the folk circuit. After numerous abortive attempts to interest several major record companies in her demo tape, glowing reviews from music critics wooed A&M Records into offering her a recording contract - despite having turned her down twice before. In April 1985, her debut album, "Suzanne Vega", was released, produced by Lenny Kaye and her co-manager, Steve Addabo. Its collection of self-penned literate and understated songs, showing only a passing resembelance to neo-folk, received universal critical acclaim and Suzanne Vega came to be regarded as the vanguard of a new generation of female singer-songwriters. The album reached number eleven on the UK album chart and provided her first major singles hit, "Marlene on the Wall".

The following year, while continuing to tour to promote the album, she performed at a benefit concert in London for the Prince's Trust charity and featured on two recordings - the soundtrack of the John Hughes' film, Pretty in Pink, with her song, "Left of Centre", and on the Smithereens' "Especially for You" album, co-writing and singing on the track, "A Lonely Place". In 1987, while writing songs for her second album, she contributed two compositions to the Philip Glass album, "Songs of Liquid Days".

The release of her follow-up, "Solitude Standing", was buoyed by the huge success of the single, "Luka", which broke new ground in the pop charts, written, as it was, from the viewpoint of a child abuse victim. The song was to bring her numerous awards from organisations, fighting child abuse, for the recognition it broughtto the issue. It also garnered a Grammy nomination, and an MTV award for best female video. The album reached the US Top Twenty and the UK Top Ten. Continuing her film soundtrack work, Suzanne Vega wrote the title song for the Disney compilation, Stay Awake.

In 1990, "Days of Open hand", co-produced by Suzanne Vega and Anton Sanko, was released to a mixed critical reception- while more experimental musicaly, it moved the focus away from the introspective viewpoint of the two previous albums, to observations of the external world. Veteran music film-maker D.A. Pennebaker shot a documentary of the preparations for, and the early part of the "Open Hand" tour, which was shown on British and American television soon after the album was released. Later that year, a surprise money-spinner surfaced when a little-known British dance re-mix duo, DNA, released a bootleg recording of "Tom's Diner", the a capella track from "Solitude Standing", with a heavy dance beat overlaid. Putting aside the option of legal action, A&M decided to release the track with Suzanne Vega's blessing. The song stayed on the British pop and dance charts for weeks.

The following year, Suzanne Vega compiled "Tom's Album", a quirky collection of unsolicited versions of "Tom's Diner" which she'd been sent by fans and musicians, in the wake of DNA's experimentation. She also contributed two tracks to "Deadicated", an album of covers of Grateful Dead songs, and began writing for her new album, "99.9F", which was released in mid-1992. Produced by Mitchell Froom, it was more technically innovative than her earlier work, relying heavily on percussion, distortion and more accessible pop and techno beats. Her concert appearances included the Woody Guthrie Tribute in New York and a benefit for Italy's Berloni Foundation, organised by Luciano Pavarotti in Modena, in aid of leukaemia patients. She toured for much of 1993 in support of "99.9F' and apeared at a benefit concert for Amnesty International in London. She has campaigned in suport of Amnesty's Working Group for Children.

Suzanne Vega lives in New York City.

I'd wanted to be a performer, from the time I was five or six. I was always dancing up and down the hallway or making costumes for myself, or getting the other kids to do stuff with me, or singing to them. I had sung at Carnegie Hall when I was twelve, because of Pete Seeger. He had come to my school and picked me out, me and my sister, [to be] among a bunch of kids to sit at his feet at Carnegie Hall. That was probably my first gig.

By that point I had already decided that I wanted to be one of these famous people. I think I decided that when I was five or six. I wanted to get my name in the newspapers. Most kids feel disregarded, and what you're after is for someone to really listento you. So you start imagining that if you're a very famous model, or the first woman on the moon, that you'll get that feeling of importance. I took myself very seriously; I knew that I was smart because everyone always said so. And I remember people thinking I was kind of amusing because I seemed so much older than I actually was, and I seemed very precocious. People thought, "Oh, she's really cute, look at her reading there." I didn't have any sense of what I looked like, or if I was pretty or if I was good or if I was useful. It was more imoportant to be smart than to be sexy; some girls get attention through being sexy, whereas, although I was always interested in sex, I never felt that I needed to be sexy to get attention. I preferred doing it in a smart way.

I remember feeling very odd and very much like a target because I was easily the whitest kid [at school]. These very dark black kids would come up and touch my face and my hair because they'd never seen anybody so white especially up close like that, so I had this sense of being kind of weird and not knowing how to fit in. I was later transferred to a gifted children's class which was really racially mixed and I was really happy there because I found I could talk to the other kids. In high school, I was part of a Puerto Rican singing troupe and we would go around and sing in different boroughs; it was a government-sponsored programme to bring the Puerto Rican culture back to the Hispanic community. So we would sing these songs in Spanish and everyone there was either Puerto Rican or Cuban or Dominican and again it was always like, "What's she doing here?" Once they heard me speak Spanish it was kind of OK but in the end, I definitely felt that I was trying to jam myself into a place that I didn't fit into.

I grew up feeling like the odd one out even though I was told that I was actually Puerto Rican and I could speak Spanish and I had gone to Puerto Rico and I felt very comfortable with my step-father's family. He asked me one day if I'd ever wondered why I didn't look like him, and actually we look as far different as people can possibly look. So, obviously it was a big surprise [that he was not my real father] but I think it also confirmed that wierd feeling of feeling different. I didn't even really click right away; mostly I just remember feeling annoyed and feeling embarrassed at being singled out, and wondering whether it was a joke of some kind. After that it was just as if it had never really happened, except occasionally one of my brothers would suddenly burst out at the dinner table and say, "Isn't it true that Suzie has another father" and we'd tell him to shut up!

I studied dance from the time I was nine to when I was about eighteen. I especially wanted to study the Martha Graham technique which is what I specialised in when I went to the High School of Performing Arts in 1976. [Back then] everyone wanted to be Liza Minneli or David Bowie and everyone was dying their hair red and it was very flash. One of my first days I got there someone gave me a big hug and kissed me on both cheeks and then realised they had mistaken me for somebody else! I was very serious and tended to dress in these big sweaters and baggy clothes. Most of my friends were in the classical music department and they were considered sort of nerdy. That's where I gravitated.

I was terribly competative, I couldn't bear to have anything less than the highest marks. But I was terribly depressed also and I found it really hard to control my body. So I was getting low marks because I was depressed and I had no energy. This really got to me because again, I felt that sense of trying to jam myself into a situation where I wasn't going to shine and where I wasn't really going to be myself or be appreciated for what I thought I was. It was a very frustrating period. Now I realise that I had certain health problems that were preventing me. I had asthma, I was anaemic, I had all these other things that I didn't know about. So I was kind of fighting the tide.

I had already started writing songs by that point and I'd started to perform them when I was about sixteen. I'd go to these different coffee-houses and I'd play the songs that I'd written. I felt very hostile towards the audience, often. I didn't get any jobs for a long time because of it! Patti Smith was the big rage, and David Bowie, so I was very, very out of fashion. Most people said to me, "well, you're talented and if it was ten years ago, you'd probably be a big star but you should probably just forget about it because you've got an attitude and obviously, you don't have any experience, you can't just get up on stage and sing and expect people to just come to you."

So I would go down to these clubs in the [Greenwich] Village. There was one club where I had heard it all began, the Bitter End. This is where I understood, if you played at the Bitter End and if you got accepted there, then you could go on to Folk City and then after that you could go on to the Bottom line. So I had this hierarchy planted very firmly in my mind. So I tried to get a gig at the Bitter End for two years - I kept getting rejected! There was one man there who would sit and eat his dinner while you were [auditioning] and he'd be sitting there drinking and eating pork chops and looking around the room. He knew me already because I'd come down every other month and I'd get rejected and leave. And then come down again.

It made me fed up but on the other hand, I had this very slow and steady stubborn way of doing things and if one person, or two people, said, "I really like your lyrics or I really listen to you", that was enough to keep me going. I started to be methodical about it, and keep a notebook of what songs I had sung and how I'd done my hair, and who was there, and what they said, and if I'd made any money. I was trying to control the conditions and approach it as a professional. As a dancer, for example, you know that you have to warm up, you can't just come out on stage, you have to know your cues and know the lighting. So I ws approaching it the way a dancer would.

I had a very strong sense of what it was I wanted to say and I got enough encouragement so that I didn't feel I needed to change too drastically. I had no desire to get into a pop band, I hated most of the things that were fashionable. I was never really eager. I was never, "Oh, please, sign me". I was always like, "Go to hell!" and if people stuck around then I figured that they were serious.

Finaly, I completed a demo tape which was unanimously rejected by every major label in America, including A&M, which rejected it twice. The turning-point came when I kept getting really good reviews. A&M eventually funded a new demo and we had a production deal. The first album ["Suzanne Vega"] came out and they were expecting to sell thirty thousand copies worldwide and it sold much more than that. I had mixed feeling because on the one hand, I wasn't naive. I was young but I wasn't naive. I had seen people who were doing so well just go streaking through the folk scene in New York getting tremendous amounts of press and hype and then they kind of crashed. So I was aware that the record could have easily ended up in the ninety-nine cent bin.

When the album came out, I felt plucked out of the scene that I had been happily sloshing in, plucked out and thrown around the world as an example. The thing that puzzled me was that a lot of people said, "Oh, look, it's a folk revival, look, she's playing acoustic guitar". And I thought, "Wait a second, that's not what I'm really about". Because even in the folk scene I wasn't known as being a good representation of folk music. It was more like, "she's doing something odd, something different, she's taken the acoustic guitar and made a weired thing out of it". But none of that seemed to be picked up by the press, all they talked about was the folk revival and it suddenly seemed like it was going to be 1964 again. That was disappointing to me because I did't want to be a symbol of the folk revival, I wanted people to pick out what was distinctive about what I was doing.

At that point, I didn't feel connected to anything. I felt barely connected to my own sense of history. I think I lost it for a few months there because I was so tired and I didn't have any time to reflect. I had been touring pretty consistently since 1985. I had no idea of how I wanted to present myself; I was experimenting wildly with my hair cuts! I was in my room with my scissors and I would get bored and would start snipping away and my hair started to go all askew, partly because I didn't want to be polished, and partly because I didn't want to present myself as some "beautiful chick". I wanted to maintain my perverse attitude and I wanted to see wether they would still accept me for my perversities.

In '86 we continued to tour and I'd gone right from these tours to working on the second album ["Solitude Standing"], because my manager could feel the momentum building and he was really pushing me to complete [it]. So I was aware of all this tension and by the time the whole thing broke in 1987, I was astonished. The album took off like a rocket - I wasn't expecting it at all. There was a huge buzz about "Luka" before the album even came out; it went gold in eight weeks and we just toured the rest of the year. It was five shows a week, sometimes two shows a night, and all of them were sold out. We did tremendous business all over the world and it was really exhausting. [Our] car would even be mobbed!

"Luka" was unusual for that period in time, for it to be about child abuse and for it to be such an unqualified Top Ten hit almost everywhere in the world. My expectations of myself changed. I didn't know how to dress myself for a while. I felt really weird, because I always had a slightly idiosyncratic way of dressing anyway; it tended to all be from thrift shops; what I felt comfortable wearing was like, rags! So suddenly, when I was nominated for the Grammys, I thought, "Does this mean I need to wear sequins and do my hair; what does this mean? How do I manoeuvre myself in this world?"

A lot of people want to know what the specific songs are about or how much is my own experience; what's this, or what's that, and how does it connect? And I figure that's my own business and maybe one day I'll write a book or I'll write something that will reveal that but right now I haven't written it and I don't really care what people think about it. People make all kinds of assumptions and that's fine because I've given them the stuff to do it with. I feel very strongly that I have my own particular thing that I'm working on that bugs me and keeps me going in a certain way and it's been at me for much longer than I've been in the public eye. When I read the horrible reviews, I think back to the time when I was in that club and the guy was eating his pork chop and drinking his beer and going, "Look, hon, you've got really mellow songs but it's just not happening", and I just think, "I know my own thread". I don't pretend It's any more than that; it is my own particular thread that I'm on in the world and that's what I'm paying attention to and following.

Maybe at the end of your life, people will get some perspective but it seems stupid to make these judgements now when no one has any perspective on anything. I don't like what the media says for the most part. Respect, especially, seems very begrudging. So I read it once and the I put it away. Sometimes it's useful to me because I can see the reasons they're thinking this is because of what I've said, or what I haven't done, or the way I presented myself. It's that hard-nosed professional in me that says, "OK, read this and figure out for yourself if what they're saying is true or not." A lot of it is just, "Oh, she's so thin and pale, we can sit and write things about her." A lot of it is nothing to do with my real character, which is something they can't possibly know, because I haven't revealed it. And a lot of the songs are about hiding something... I expect people to do a certain amount of detective work and if they haven't done it, then they're left with an impression of some one who's kind of soft, and timid, which I'm not. If you start crying and taking it personally and writing letters to the press, then you're just done for.

I would say maybe four people in the whole world have asked me directly: "Were you an abused child?" Most people will say, "Did you know a Luka... Is there a real person that you know who was abused... Is there someone in your neighbourhood?", all those questions. So I find I don't answer it directly and I'll say, "Yes, there was a boy named Luka, he was not abused, he lived upstairs from me and I just took his name because I liked it. I did know people who were abused" and that's all I say. I think what people need to know, they know already from the music, and those other people who don't need to know, it doesn't concern them. It says "my name is Luka", it doesn't say "my name is Suzanne Vega".

The exciting thing about "Luka" was that three milion people heard that song and responded to it, and it had an effect in the world and people wrote to me about their own experiences. So from that moment, I was part of the world and part of the dialogue, which is thrilling and I loved it. I found, in a sense, that was more liberating than the money. It was really the feeling of having my own identity in the world that was the thrill, having the freedom to go wherever I wanted to go. And the feeling that I said something small, something in my room, but that three million people heard it and responded correctly. They knew the point that I was making. You get hooked on it, you want to do that all the time.

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