Clarity, control and a straight face were once Suzanne Vega’s folk-rock hallmarks. Now she’s changed; but has she really started telling jokes on her new album ‘99.9Fº’? Laura Lee Davies hears the one about the po-faced folkie with the giggles.
"I’ve done my career thing. If I were suddenly to become a nun tomorrow, I would be very happy, ha ha ha!”
As four walls’ worth of framed music biz footage stares down at Suzanne Vega, a caution that her manager’s New York boardroom is perhaps not the best place for such reckless talk, is greeted with more laughter.
“I have already achieved more than I ever set out to,” Vega continues in a loud, inappropriately cheerful voice. “I would leave the whole thing with a free and clear conscience and I would not look back. I don’t have anything to prove. I have enough money now to just wander the world if I wanted. I don’t need any more and it gives me great satisfaction to know I don’t need to plot and plan my career. I feel I have nothing to lose, ha ha! If I’m gonna continue to make records, I have to make it satisfying.
In one of the pictures on the wall, Suzanne is sitting on a sofa with an important-looking man. The plush lounge setting suggests an embassy parlour somewhere overseas. Although Vega is smiling, she looks like she’s just had to explain the child-abuse theme of ‘Luka’ on more time. She also looks like she’s just decided that if she’s gonna continue making records, she needs to make it satisfying.
Vega has crossed town to chat about her new album, 99.9F. Her good humour suggests she’s made a record she’s satisfied with. Although Vega hardly turned into a thrash metal sex goddess, the new album does find her in a different mood. It’s like someone (producer Mitchell Froom, actually) has entered the candle-lit room of her untidy creative process and turned the strip light on.
“Last time we spoke, I think I was unsure if anyone understood the intent of what I was doing. So in order to keep it interesting for me, I have to continue to get closer to what the intent is. I have to strip away. That means taking chances and letting go of a lot of things. I felt really brave and thought, “Why not make a big racket?”
Apart from her fleeting encounter with defness -- when DNA remixed her a cappella ditty ‘Tom’s Diner’ for the dance floor -- Suzanne Vega has rarely been known to rouse the listener from their armchair. Despite the great shopping opportunity afforded, the feeling around the Time Out office was that an evening in with a tin of Ovaltine was preferable to a weekend in New York with Suzanne Vega. Her three previous albums have gained her a loyal fan-base who appreciate her maps through life’s hell, but if ‘Marlene On The Wall’ and a geometrical haircut is as far as your knowledge of her extends, you should pay attention to her new album. The pitch-black humour is still there, but it’s articulated in a far less immaculate, at times rather noisy way. Sex, life and death are confronted with a sincere heart, a clatter of percussion and a joke red nose.
“I thought, ‘Why not write about these really dark, horrible subjects, but with a sense of humour’. Why not just fling away everything I’ve ever done before, ha ha ha, why not?
“I guess a lot of things in my life had changed. Some long-term relationships had broken up in the last year and I was working without my usual band. That added to the feeling of recklessness, I guess. Mitchell had said something about jumping off musical cliffs and that was the spirit with which we entered into it: ‘Hey, there’s a cliff, let’s jump!’.”
In another picture on the wall, Suzanne is standing with four or five music executive-looking men. Her slender frame and features appear boyish next to the “I’ve done lunch” figures around her. She’s smiling, but she looks all set to do the creative lemming thing right there.
“It’s been great fun recording this album. I wanted it to be fast and full of vitality. I wanted to make my point and then quit the business, I mean the song. That’s why the songs are short and sort of in your face. I’ve always felt the words had a lot of attitude, but for me the music has been a constant process of trying to be more vivid.”
So Costello / Crowded House / Richard Thompson producer Froom and Vega got together in the studio with some sketches of songs and spent a few weeks shifting the musical goalposts and trying to make each other laugh.
“Before, the rule was to make everything sound clean and nice,” she laughs disrespectfully. “The intention would be to sing on time, in time, and to get rid of any humming, buzzing, clanking, whirring, smashing noises. This time it was to use everything we had. To use the garbage as well as the clean stuff. That made a lot more sense to me because that’s how I write. I pick up everything from little pieces of children’s games to medical text books. We had a really great time. How do you keep that spirit going instead of getting too old and serious about it?”
It’s impossible to put an age on her, but as soon as Suzanne Vega closes her mouth, she immediately looks serious again. It’s not difficult, however, to get her wise-cracking. Her upbringing on the streets of New York City toughened any artistic tenderness she might be prone to; she’d look for the knuckle dusters before she allowed criticism to send her sobbing to the bathroom. I shouldn’t image there’s a space for a chaise-longue in her roomy NY loft. It must be frustrating for someone so sharp and witty to be forever misinterpreted as an over-sensitive singer/songwriter with librarian tendencies.
"I'm a little nervous about how this album will be taken. I did the first interview yesterday and this guy came in with such a long serious face, saying he thought it was my darkest album yet! And I was like, ’Okay, so it’s about death and stuff, you don’t think that’s funny?’ I do find it frustrating when people get it wrong, but I guess it’s part of my job to get out of bed and make people understand. Perhaps I get misinterpreted because of the way I look. I’m a polite, pale person, heh heh. And I don’t scream and curse much, at least not in front of the tape recorders. I don’t use the obvious signs of anger and violence. I don’t have a shaved head like Sinead O’Connor and I don’t dress up in costumes like Kate Bush (much). To all intents and purposes I seem innocuous. I have done it since I was six years old. It’s because I’m reserved. But I’m not timid. People who listen to my records realise there’s a whole weight behind my songs that doesn’t show in my face. There are a lot of sensitive people in the world but that doesn’t mean we should listen to everyone who’s bleating.”
Although the album kicks hard, the first single to be realised over here is the sweetly romantic ‘In Liverpool’, which Vega admits is strongly reminiscent of ‘60s girl-group pop. she has already been criticised for singing about the town when she’s not from there, but the song is a simple splice of nostalgia for an old boyfriend and a place she’s loved since she first heard The Beatles. “I had an argument with someone who was saying how dare I go into Liverpool and write about it. But it’s obviously written from an outsider’s perspective. It’s not like I’m Bono singing about Spanish Harlem! This guy was saying ‘Oh, so there’s avenues in Liverpool are there?’ I looked it up and it was like, ‘Okay, so you don’t call big fat streets fucking “avenues”, so sue me, write me a letter, fuck you!’.”
Posing for shots on the roof of her manager’s office, Vega says she enjoys living in New York, despite and probably because of the shit. She’s thinking of maybe moving soon, perhaps even to London. In the meantime she awaits the reaction to 99.9F, although chart success comes second to personal satisfaction: “My career is not worth my life! That’s not fair! But I like to keep dragging the darker things out and flinging them in people’s faces,” she laughs (again). “It’s fun for me to do that, ha ha ha.”
Submitted by Matthew Hsu
VegaNet@aol.com
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