reuters article, december 24, 1996
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Suzanne Vega Expands Style on "Nine Objects"
By Gary Graff DETROIT (Reuter) - Suzanne Vega and her band were back home in New York when the city celebrated the Yankees World Series victory. Some of the musicians hung out at the ticker tape parade. Vega? She was working out at the gym -- though she was perfectly aware of the Yankees' victory and its implications. ``We were actually in Atlanta while they were playing in Atlanta,'' says the 37-year-old singer-songwriter. Actually, Vega performed the night of the Yankees' dramatic Game 5 win, but she thought better of taunting the Braves' partisans in the audience. ``They'd have killed me if I did that,'' Vega says with a laugh. ``Besides, when we went onstage, (the Yankees) were losing, and when we came offstage, they were still losing. They didn't win until late that night, so we had nothing to mock them about.'' Vega is back on the road as she speaks, riding the tour bus towards New Haven, Conn. It's her first time on the road in four years. In that time Vega had a daughter, Ruby, who's now 2, and got married to producer Mitchell Froom, who produced her last two albums, 1992's ``99.9 F'' and the new ``Nine Objects of Desire.'' These are substantial changes for Vega -- ``My life kind of shut down for a year or two there,'' she notes -- and they've impacted on her creativity as well. ``I've had to be a lot more structured, which I never had to be in the past,'' explains the devout Buddhist. ``Before I could just wait for inspiration to strike me. It used to be like falling into a trap, and you could just stay in it as long as you needed -- until it was done. That was fairly easy. Now it's harder.'' Vega has even established some new rules for her music-making. She no longer works on her material at home, keeping that time dedicated to her family. Instead, she rented an apartment one floor below her Manhattan digs, in which she wrote many of the new songs for ``Nine Objects.'' ``It was the only peaceful place I could go,'' Vega says. ''I had to schedule between 4 and 6 every afternoon to go downstairs and work. If I could get started by 4:30, the inspiration would usually start coming by 5:15.'' ``Nine Objects'' also represents something of a change for Vega. While she established herself during the mid-80s with more folk-oriented material, such as the hit ``Luka,'' she had already started expanding her stylistic ambitions. She had a dance club hit when British dance producers DNA revamped her a capella song ``Tom's Diner,'' and on ``99.9 F'' she put aside her acoustic guitar and embraced industrial sounds and modern dance beat. On ``Nine Objects,'' she reaches even further. The album's 12 songs touch on her troubadour past but also incorporate polyrhythms, dance beats and even Latin flavors -- all fortified by Froom's dry, in-your-face soundscape. ``I've always been interested in a lot of different styles of music,'' Vega says. ``The very first song I wrote was a country-western song; the second was a long folk ballad. I wrote a lot of different kinds of things in my teens; some of them were bossa nova-type songs. ``I think all the albums have a fairly wide variety of songs, but not of production. This time, Mitchell matched different kinds of sounds to each song.'' Vega says she can't work on the road,'' so she hasn't started working on songs for her next record. Besides, she says, Ruby -- who's on the road with a nanny in tow -- keeps Vega, and everyone else, fairly well occupied. ``Last year she was kind of shy with men; this year she's on the bus with 11 of them, so she's used to that pretty well,'' Vega reports. ``She's got everyone watching cartoons.'' Reuters/Variety Submitted by Unique212@aol.com |
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