A plain-Jane waif with an acoustic guitar, Suzanne Vega doesn't look or sound anything like a pop star. When she takes the stage on her current U.S. concert tour, she doesn't shimmy or prance, hoot or howl. She doesn't even open with a razzle-dazzle show stopper. She sings her first song, about having breakfast in a diner, a cappella. Her well-scrubbed fans, who've been packing concert halls across the United States, fall into a Sunday-school hush as she strums her guitar and leads them through Vega land-haunting songs about city streets and scarred people, like the abused child in her hit single, "Luka." It's strange stuff for a pop sensation who is sharing the top of the charts with Madonna. Material Girl, meet the Ethereal Girl.

At first, Vega's music seems to be a throwback throwback to the 1960s. Even though she started hanging out in New York's Greenwich Village folk scene as a teenager, her songs now are about individuals, not issues."Luka", for example is a vignette about a specific character, and the singer thinks that using it to campaign against child abuse would be "opportunistic." "I like to write songs about people and the way they experience things," she says. "I try to give people's feelings shape, color and texture."A college English major who paid attention to her lessons on literary symbolism, Vega creates a mood by painting precision images of, say, a dreary urban market or a sleeping child. The cool detachment of her lyrics fits her dispassionate vocal style and clear, no-frills voice. Her backup band and synthesizers give the songs a commercial polish-in fact, her, most recent album, "Solitude Standing," is number 14 on the pop charts and climbing.

Bossa nova: The tough urban landscape is Vega's natural source of material. Now 28, she was raised in New York's Spanish Harlem, the stepdaughter of a Puerto Rican novelist. She began writing songs at 14 and played at folk clubs while in college at Barnard. Her influences ranged from bossa nova to folk singer Leonard Cohen. Then she went to her first rock concert, where she heard punk star Lou Reed. "Suddenly I started feeling that I could be experimental," she recalls. "You could write a song with no chorus or no melody. I felt like all the restraints were taken off." She landed at Folk City, the club that launched Bob Dylan, and eventually won a record contract. Two years ago her debut album, "Suzanne Vega," became a big hit on college radio; - it sold a respectable 250,000 copies, as well as scoring high with many critics.

Vega still lives simply in a small Greenwich Village apartment. A practicing Buddhist, she chants twice a day. But she counts among her fans some big-time names: Prince, Sting and minimalist composer Philip Glass, for whom she contributed lyrics to the album "Songs From Liquid Days." Jonathan Demme ("Stop Making Sense," "Swing Shift") is directing her next video. But her mainstream success makes her uneasy. "Some part of me is feeling that maybe I've done something wrong if I'm this popular," she says. "I always thought,'Oh, who would want to be everybody's cup of tea?"' She may be reaching a wide audience, but she's doing it with music that's all her own.

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Submitted by Julie Chan

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