First impressions can be misleading. Take the case of Suzanne Vega. When she emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene with her debut record in 1985, she earned a reputation as being a shy, overly sensitive poetess who sang sotto voce songs of love's dark side.

To some fans and critics, uninformed or unwilling to accept what she's become, Vega remains that delicate waif folkie. The delightful truth of the matter is that Suzanne Vega has spent the last nine years growing in all sorts of unpredictable directions.

Her musical tree, from folk roots, has branched out to include Bealesque power pop, synthesized mood pieces and even hip-hop (thanks to her encounter with British rappers DNA on "Tom's Diner"). On her last release, 99.9 F, her experimental bent lured her into dense aural landscapes bursting with industrial clangs, funky bass loops and mad calliope swoops. She even sang through a fuzzbox. A decidedly unfolky thing to do.

Through all Vega's blossoming of creative talent, there has remained one constant: top-notch songwriting. Finely detailed and hard-hitting, her songs are as potent for what they leave unsaid. Inspired by heroes like Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed, she is becoming a master of this style of emotional suggestion.

On stage, Vega weaves a quiet spell, letting her plaintive, almost vibratoless voice glide above her percussive guitar playing. In between songs, she displays a dry wit and dead-on comic timing dispelling yet another myth about her that she has no sense of humor.

Suzanne is currently writing new material and planning her next record. We recently spent an hour talking with this consummate performing songwriter about her muses and methods of songwriting.

Do you feel like songwriting is something that comes naturally to you?
Yeah, I do. I always felt I had an ability to rhyme words, even when I was very young. When I would write poetry, that came the most easily to me - the stuff with rhyme and rhythm. So I do think it comes naturally, though it doesn't always come easily.

Was there a point where you decided to become a songwriter?
I was eleven when I first picked up the guitar. I tried to write songs for about two years before I wrote one that I was satisfied with. So I was fourteen when the first one was finished. But with some of the early ones, the structure's there, you can kind of see it.

How do song ideas make themselves known to you most often?
There's different ways. Some of them are straightforward, you know, you see something in the street or something occurs to you. I thinkthe song "Left Of Center"was an example of that. I wrote it from the title on down. And "Cracking"was something like that too. I also use things like medical textbooks, science textbooks and various bits of information.

Do you do a lot of editing in your head before you start to write the idea?
Lately I'll write out the general idea in longhand and then eventually the whole thing gets whittled down. So I wouldn't say that I edit it first, but I try to make sure that it's at least a good idea or something worth pursuing. Sometimes those initial longhand ideas come out in rhyme and in meter, but some of them don't. For example, "The Queen and the Soldier", I had been thinking about that song for months and months, and when I finally sat down to write it came out in rhyme and in meter, and in surprising ways. Ways that I hadn't expected. The rhymes would suggest themselves to me, that's the way it seemed. Whereas a song like "Rock In The Pocket," I must have had about three or four pages written out of the storyline before I finally boiled it down to the three verses that it is.

The "Queen and the Soldier" has always been one of my favorite songs of yours. Do you recall what inspired it?
It's hard to say exactly. I know that I wanted to write a song about a woman who was in power and it's hard to find a symbol for someone like that, expecially in America. So I chose the queen to do that. There are details in ti that were influenced by things that were happening around me at the time, but I can't really tell you where the idea came from. The original idea was that I had two queens that were fighting each other and then I got rid of one of them because it seemed like a stupid idea. Once I got one of the queens out of there and put the battle outside the castle, then that made more sense. Then once I had the soldier come to the door, the whole thing unfolded itself. It took me months though to get to the point where the whole thing would clarify itself.

Where did the line about swallowing "the secret burning thread" come from?
That's the line that means a lot of different things to me, because it's the one line that doesn't make logical sense. People don't swallow threads. That comes from a lot of different sources. One source was that I had a cat who would chew the bottom off the curtains. She did in fact swallow a thread and she had to be put to sleep around that time. The other thing is that, sometimes in your life, I think, you may have a secret; and if you swallow it, if you keep it to yourself, that's what it feels like. Or I used to think of relationships between people as threads, so if there's one that's secret and has a certain poisonous character to it, then you keep it to yourself, you swallow it. I think that's really the deeper meaning of what I meant. She swallowed something that was hurting her. And I had something like that in my own life.

When one of your songs is first emerging, how much control do you maintain?
Each one is different. The best ones are the ones where you don't have any control, where the thing just takes over and writes itself. The worst ones are the ones where you have to sit and paste and cut and look in the rhyming dictionary. They're the ones that sort of die half way through and you have to keep going over and breathe life into them.

Do you have any feelings about songs that are completed quickly versus those that may take years?
The weird thing is that the songs that take the longest are sometimes the quickest ones to write, because you can spend months, as I said before, thinking about an idea and then when you sit down to write it, it'll take an hour or two. "The Queen and the Soldier," even though it took months of thinking about it, took about three hours to write. Same thing with "Luka." I took me months circling that idea, then I wrote the whole thing in about two hours.

Tell me about how a character song like "Luka" evolves.
Well, a character song is a tricky thing because, for me, there's always a connection between what I'm writing about and something that I'm feeling. So ti's never abstract. I never just pluck somebody off the street and say I'll write about that person. There's always something about that situation that I'm writing about that's true about my own life. Even if it's not the exact same thing, it's close. So in the case of "Luka," there was a boy whose name was Luka who lived upstairs from me, who seemed like a happy child. Not exactly happy, but he was not abused, as far as I knew. But I would watch him and he seemed sort of set apart from the other kids when he was playing, and I remember thinking I would take his character and use it for that particular idea. Write it from his voice, because in that way I wanted the song to stand up on its own, which I think the character songs do, if you do them well. Because I wanted to write from the point of view of a nine-year old boy, I was making it as simple as possible. I was also aware that the audience in the song is the neighbor. So it was kind of like writing a play. First of all, how do you introduce the character? You do that by saying, my name is Luka, I live on the second floor. And then you get the audience involved, saying, I live upstairs from you. So you've seen me before. You're incriminating the audience. You're pointing the finger without reall doing it. You're unfolding this story that can't really be told and you're involving the audience in it and that was what I wanted to do.

Did you try different musical settings for "Luka?"
No, not at all. The idea of making it sad by putting it in a minor key, making it melancholy, just seemed really sentimental and horrible to me. I wanted it to be a song that was matter of fact as the boy's voice would be. When I sing it alone on the acoustic guitar, I think it does come out that way. I think when we produced it for the album, it came out the way it did because of the synthesizers. It gave it a more uplifting effect than I intended (laughs).

I read that the idea for "Tired of Sleeping" was something you found in a notebook from eight years earlier. Is that typical of the way you write?
Yeah, definitely. I think that life - my life anyway - doesn't seem to go in any particular straight line. It seems to go round in circles, so something that was important to me when I was much younger is still important to me. Things repeat themselves. That's how you know if it's a good idea, if it's still relevant years later.

Will you still work on more than one song at a time?
Usually yeah, I have a batch in the oven (laughs). I prefer to have a bunch going at once, that way you don't get so hysterical if one comes out badly (laughs). You don't have everything hanging on one song. But my tactics have changed since when I was in my early twenties and I didn't have a record deal, I would be writing a song maybe once every other month. And now I find that I go for long, dry periods where I just don't want to think about anything, then I go through periods where I'm writing a bunch a week. So it's changed because my schedule has changed.

Do you ever play half-finished songs for friends?
No (laughs). I'm really superstitious about that. I just feel like you lose it; if you don't catch it while it's still struggling, then you kind of lose something in it. And people can't always see that it's not finished and they'll say something that kills the whole thing. I would prefer to finish it. I have enough trouble singing them when they're brand new and they are finished. Usually I feel a sort of cringing feeling.

Are there certain tests that a song has to pass before you'll consider it finished?
If I still like it the next morning, I really think about the subject matter a lot, because to me, you have to really be careful about writing about things that are trendy. Humor doesn't seem to sit well in my songs, for example. Something that I think is funny doesn't wear well. So I try to look at it from different angles and the different moods I might be in. And I've learned over the years that it's better to have some kind of formal structure rather than thinking you're being inventive and deciding to do away with the melody all together, for example. I think in my early twenties I thought I was being clever by saying I don't need to write with a melody or I don't need to write with this or that, but it's better to stick to some kind of structure. To have a chorus, to have a melody, to have rhymes. Formal guidelines.

You mentioned humor. I've read other interviews with you where you said you felt like sometimes people missed the humor in your songs. Can you explain that?
I guess the first thing that comes to mind is a song like "Small Blue Thing," which to me had a humorous element, and was meant to be more playful than it's been interpreted. It was meant to be almost like a cartoon, like a question that you'd ask a child. "If you were to describe how you felt, what would you be like?" Or "If you were a small blue thing, what would you be?" That to me isn't side-splitting funny, but it has an element of whimsy that some people don't look at. I have to say that most of the songs that I wrote as overtly angry, bitter songs don't wear well with me. Most of them I don't sing anymore, wheras the really sad ones seem to always go very well (laughs), for me, I don't know why that is. The really sad ones like "The Queen and the Soldier" and "Cracking" are the ones that people really respond to.

You once said that you felt like the secret of life was in A minor.
(Laughs). It seemed that way for a long time and that was something from even when I was a child. It just seemed that the really true songs seemed to be all really sad and in that particular key.

Were you conscious from the beginning about the kinds of words and phrases you use in your songs? They're very identifiable - those short, hard-sounding words.
It was a decision I made in my twenties. I'd been writing songs for about six or seven years at that point. I don't know why I decided to adapt that particular way of writing, but I think it's because I felt that a lot of songs were really romantic and I wanted to do something different that was more urban. That's one reason. Those shorter phrases seemed to hit harder. They were more satisfying to sing. But the other thing that I've discovered is that I think I tend to sing in short phrases because I've had asthma for a long time and couldn't really breathe and hold the long notes. I only discovered that I had that a few years ago. So I developed my writing style to accommodate my voice unconsciously. I didn't intend to do it, I was just trying to write like a good writer, to the point and punchy, in words that were vivid.

Were there any authors that influenced your writing style?
John Steinbeck was someone who wrote in that simple style. I started to read poetry. I was reading Sylvia Plath, and I just really like the way she writes, because it's always startling and always interesting and she tends to use those short phrases with uncomfortable images.

One of my favorites from your last record was "In Liverpool." How did that song come about?
That was a really odd one. That was one I wasn't sure would fly, because it's bits and pieces, it's a mood really and a fantasy. It came about because I was on tour and I was in Liverpool and I was lying on the bed of the hotel we were staying in. And I was trying to take a nap and there was this enormous clamoring going on across the street. We were staying across the street from a cathedral. I started to think about one of my first boyfriends, who was from Liverpool. That started to put me in the mood of - well, because I read a lot, it put me in the mood of the books like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and things that had to do with bells, and the ringing of bells. I was thinking about old loves, so there was this sort of nostalgic feeling to the whole afternoon. So I took the moments that made sense and put them altogether in the song.

Did you purposely leave "Blood Makes Noise" open-ended?
Yes, I did, because it's a song about a moment. It's not a song about an issue. People want to say, wll that's her AIDS song. It's a song about fear and it's a song about the fear of disclosing information, which a lot of the songs are about. It's a song that I can't entirely explain myself, because the attitude towards the doctor is extremely sarcastic and ironic. Here's someone who's an authority who's trying to help you and you're not being helpful. It has a sort of mocking tone to it.

I've heard you comment that there's a lot in your lyrics that you don't understand?
Yeah, some of it is like that because it comes to me and then I write it down. It's like getting a message on a telephone. Sometimes it comes in clearly and sometimes it doesn't. sometimes you don't understand all the bits. That's what I mean by thst. It's like a dream, where sometimes you don't quite understand it. Songs are in that world.

You've talked in the past about some pretty specific musical influences. Have you ever used a song by another artist as a springboard for one of your own?
Yes, mostly Lou Reed songs. I guess "I'm Waiting for My Man," I used when I was thinking about "Men in a War." And it's pretty clear. If you listen to it musically, you can tell. The production didn't relfect as much of it as I would've liked maybe at that time, but the musical structure came from that.

Can you think of some of your favorite songs by other artists?
Yeah, well there's "It's All Right, Ma" by Bob Dylan, which I love and I got to sing it at The Bottom Line a few weeks ago and that was just a great feeling. "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Leonard Cohen. He's got one called "Avalanche" that I love, too. There's a lot that he's written that I really like. There's a bunch by Laura Nyro and a couple of Rickie Lee Jones', especially the Pirates album.

Did the course your song "Tom's Diner" took surprise you?
Well, yeah, because it was such a small idea that became such a big thing. It was like a whimsical thing. I was thinking of my friend Brian and I was thinking of writing through his eyes and I sort of had this tune in my head, then I put the whole thing down. It became sort of a signature thing.

Was that an actual place?
Yeah, there's a place called Tom's Restaurant on 112th Street and Broadway, right near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Everyone from school would go there and eat. There's nothing really special about it. It's a very ordinary place, which is why I liked it.

After the DNA rap version of that song, did you fell like it set you free as an artist to experiment?
Yeah, I think it was something I would've done eventually anyway. The DNA version of "Tom's Diner" was not something I woul've done myself, but I liked it when I heard it. I thought it was funny. And it did make me feel more free, but as I say, I think I would've eventually gotten there, because I was starting to feel very hemmed in by the production techniques we were using.

Your singing style is instantly recognizable. How did you develop it?
Mostly I took what I liked. When I was a kid, the voices I loved were voices like Astrud Gilberto. And I didn't like the adult ways of singing, I didn't like the vibrato - that didn't mean anything to me. I preferred voices that were very direct. And I liked Lou Reed's voice. Lotte Lenya's voice, the voices that are straightforward. So that's what I tried to do. I just tried to make my voice come out in the simplest way possible, with no pretending that I'm a fine singer or anything. I wasn't interested in being a fine singer, I didn't care about that.

Did you decide to mix in spoken word with melody?
Well, melody is something that I've had to work on very hard, because the thing that comes naturally to me is rhythm and rhyme in the songwriting. Melody is something I've had to really sit down and consciously work on. To figure out how a melody develops. You can't just repeat something over and over again. A melody is its own idea, but I didn't know that. So I mixed in spoken words, because I thought I was being experimental. Actually it was kind of a weakness of mine. Melody is my weakness, rhythm and rhyme ar my strengths.

What do you do to develop you melodic sense?
If I'm listening to a classical piece I'll try to be aware of what the melodic line is, because I have a hard time remembering melodies or singing them. So sometimes I'll just try to make myself think of a melody. if I'm listening to classical or jazz, I think, where is the melody, how does it deviate? Or when I'm writing, now that I'm more aware, I try to put in some variation. Instead of repeating this phrase here, maybe I should take it up higher, maybe I should go lower. Or I listen to Elvis Costello, who seems to have endless variations and all kinds of melodies, and I'll follow his thinking. It's the same way I do if I'm reading John Steinbeck - you just don't read it for the story, yo get into the language. You take the sentences apart to see what he's done and how he's done it. So I try and do that a little bit with people like Elvis Costello, who seems to have a natural gift.

"When Heroes Go Down" and "In Liverpool" have an Elvis Costello sound them.
Especially "When Heroes Go Down." I was looking for something that was melodic, short and punchy, and I was thinking of Elvis Costello. "In Liverpool" was a mixture. I was tying to teach myself how to play "Almost Blue" (a Costello song). That's where the verses came from. Then the chorus was just something else. And I jammed the two things together. At first I thought maybe it was really corny or it had a feeling like a campfire song (laughs), but then I realized that it worked. Another example of that is I was trying to teach myself how to play the Chrissie Hynde song "Kid." And I realized that the reason her songs sound classic is because she uses those chords that you hear from all the 50s songs. They are songs that you would sing around the campfire, but because of the production, it's much cooler than that. But there's still a classic element to what she does because of those chords. That made me not afraid to use plain,simple chords like E and A and B7, chords that I felt like everybody used.

Is it more important that those efforts to learn someone else's song lead you to create one of your own, or do you actually ever get around to working that song into your repertoire?
(Laughs) In the case of "Almost Blue,"I just stopped when I got the other idea. I did learn how to play "Kid"and I did play it in my band, but I found for me to cover a Chrissie Hynde song, it didn't help anything. For a woman to sing another woman's song, unless she can really put a twist on it, it's sometimes not as effective. Whereas if I sing an Elvis Costello song or a Bob Dylan song, I can give it a different meaning.

Do you ever feel like your audience wants to restrict you to their version of who you are?
Yeah, certainly, all the time. But on the other hand, my audience seems to change constantly. In 1985, it was like, oh she's a folkie. Then in 1987, I suddenly was accused of having all kinds of yuppie CD-buying audiences, which I thought was kind of odd. Things change, and I find the audience changes. The audience gets younger sometimes. The last record attracted al lot of 12-year old girls coming to the shows. So the audiences change. I think to some degree, I have been somewhat misinterpreted, but I'm not complaining about it. I'm just saying that I'm difficult to categorize. I look a certain way, but I'm not that way. I may look like a sort of Irish maiden, but I grew up in New York City under very unusual circumstances, so I'm not what I appear to be. so some people will stick with me in the long run, and other people will find other people. That's just the way it is.

Do you see yourself as an artist like Joe Jackson or David Bowie, and who tries different musical styles from record to record?
Probably, because I think that the strength of what I do is in the words. The musical setting will always change, because I always thought of myself as a songwriter. The production aspects are new to me, so they're constantly changing. I'm always trying to find the best production for the particular song. Since I write wildly different kinds of songs, the production's not always going to be the same, which unfortunately means in the real world, you can't always use it for the same thing. People like to use music, like for backgrounds at parties (laughs), or soothing themselves to sleep, or dancing to, so therefore my music will never fit into one particular use. The first two records were heard a lot in restaurants and no one plays 99.9 F in any restaurants that I've heard (laughs). You know what I'm saying?

Do you feel a pressure to outdo yourself, after 99.9 F?
No, I knew when we were oding it that it was something unusual and something that would probably not be repeated. Just because of the kind of energy that was happening at the time. It would be very stupid for me to do something like - "Blood Makes More Noise." Then I think I would start to lose my identity. So the next album probably won't be as radical, or perceived as radical. But I don't really care about that. I'm not trying to explode my consciousness here.

Any final words to songwriters?
Yeah, keep going. Don't listen to anyone's advice. Just do what you feel is right and develop your own style. Go with your strengths and be aware of your weaknesses, but don't try and be like someone else. Don't be intimidated to knock your heroes down. Don't think oh, I'll never write as good as that. Just go and do it. It'll all follow. Remember, the things that make you go, ugh, that's horrible, or no one will like this - those are the things that make you unique and make you interesting. Your friends may turn around and say, God what a freak. But you yourself, that's the thing that makes you unique, and that's what you've got to hold onto.

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