In Suzanne Vega's songs, people have psychotic breakdowns in parks, eavesdrop on subway conversations, peep across alleys into windows, and argue with a faithless lover while the lover's lover waits out in the hall. Odd stuff for a folksinger, but that's just what Vega, whose first album will be released by A&M this week, calls herself.
"Obviously, I don't sing what the Weavers sang," she says, "but I see myself as a continuation of them. There's a cultural similarity. I go onstage, often by myself, with just a guitar. That puts a lot of pressure on my songs--most rock'n'roll songs can't take that kind of scrutiny." But Vega's songs can, say the music writers who have been extolling her New York shows over the past several years. In the 'Times' last week, John Rockwell called the new album "as striking a collection of painful, precise, introspective songs as anyone, 'classical' or 'popular,' has made since the young Joni Mitchell."
Vega, 25, was born in Santa Monica but raised on West 102nd Street, went to the High School of Performing Arts and Barnard, and now lives in the Village with folk guitarist Frank Christian. She was first exposed to folk music at home, where her father sang songs by Leadbelly, but her point of no return came when she was fourteen. Rooting around in a thrift shop, she found a four-record album called 'Folk Songs and Minstrels.' "It had songs on it by Odetta, Cisco Houston, and even one by Joan Baez, recorded when she was nineteen," Vega recalls. "The music really affected me. I went around playing 'East Texas Red' for a month." Later, after it occurred to her that she didn't know where Kilgore, Texas was or what a brakeman did, she started writing about things closer to home.
An urban locale is not the only thing that sets Vega apart from conventional folksingers. Many of her songs use bossa nova and other rhythms not associated with folk, and she sometimes speaks her lyrics in an icy, Laurie Anderson-style rap. But the most distinctive feature is an edgy realism. "I write songs about romance and mental health," she says with obvious irony, since in her songs, romance is often obsession, and mental health can be a sometime thing.
"I guess I figured out [while] growing up in a tough neighborhood that sometimes the best way to confront a bad situation was to see it clearly, and try to describe it to others," she says. In doing so, Vega may also have figured out how to write folk songs for today's urban folk."
Submitted by Jeremy Schlosberg
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