time out article, january, 1997
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Suzanne Vega - Don't folk with me! A four-year sabbatical behind her, Suzanne Vega has a new album out, "Nine Objects Of Desire". Ross Fortune samples loft living with New York's foremost bedsit bard. Time Out - London's weekly guide.
Jan 29-Feb 5 1997. Nouvelle Vega New York boho Suzanne Vega became a bedsit heart-throb in the mid-'80s thanks to songs like "Marlene On The Wall" and "Luka". Now, after a four-year sabbatical in which she married her producer and had a baby, she's back with her best album yet. Lustful Suzanne Vega In Tawdry Love Tryst With Top Pop Superstar. Well hardly, but all may be revealed if, as intended, she one day publishes her private journals. "There's nothing in them about famous people I've slept with," she stresses, with a mischievous glint in her eye. "There's very little of that kind of stuff. Although one time, Sting's wife Trudi took me aside and explained, very carefully, that they had a really wonderful relationship." She laughs, "I didn't know what to think... I was just, like, a fan. I was kind of flattered. Sort of tickled, really. In fact, I spilled a cup of tea down the front of my sweater when I was talking to him, because I was nervous being there and I started to swirl my glass and it just sailed down the front of my shirt. I went running into the kitchen to try and swab it off. Now I use that sweater as part of the cat's bed. I didn't want to throw it away. It's still there, the tea stain and everything. But that was a long time ago, 12 years or something." In the intervening years, Suzanne Vega has transformed herself from an intelligent, aware and feted folkie, famed for hits like "Luka", "Marlene On The Wall" and "Tom's Diner", into an artist who is free to pursue a more individualistic and musically challenging (all be it less commercially successful) path. Drinking coffee in the light, airy library of her expansive Manhattan loft apartment overlooking the Hudson River which flows, silent and grey, beneath the ice-blue skies of a city in the clutch of a sudden, bitter freeze, she appears contented and serene. As well as the likes of Steinbeck, Carver, Nelson Algren, Emily Bronte and an "I Hate Madonna handbook", the shelving that takes up one whole wall is home to various New York Music Awards, from "Best Folk Artist" to "Best Pop Song" and, in 1992, "Best Rock Album" for "99.9F". Although Vega has been pretty much out of the public eye since then, her life has nevertheless been both full and hectic, rich and rewarding. In 1995 she married producer and musician Mitchell Froom - noted for his work with the likes of Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Los Lobos and Crowded House - and they have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ruby. "The week before I gave birth I was living in a hotel because they had taken the roof off the house and the rain was coming in," she says with a shudder. "Later I was trying to breast-feed and there'd be workmen marching round in boots, screaming instructions. It wasn't until Ruby was a year old that I started writing again." "We had started travelling because Mitchell was working on different projects, so we would go to England and Los Angeles and France. But trying to get a moment to myself in the conditions I was living in was practically impossible. In Paris I'd find myself going out on the streets for privacy!"
The result, however, "Nine Objects Of Desire", is her best album to date.
Curiously, although it appeared throughout the rest of the world last
September, the record company in the UK chose to delay it's release here.
"I guess they didn't want it to compete, with..." She pauses, a little
flustered. "With... um...er..." It is bizarre but typical of a record industry which commonly perceives women as artistically alike purely by dint of their sex that Vega's album - a deftly seductive amalgam of soft jazz stylings, pounding beats, casual bossa nova and evocative lyrical grace, beauty and humour - should have been deemed too similar to Sheryl Crow's rather vacuous and derivative rock-chick chic to offer to the public at the same time. "I don't see why Sheryl Crow and I should be falsely competing against each other," asserts Vega baldly, "but at the same time, we're both on the same record label. I don't like it, but I can understand it". "I was relieved to listen back to the album," she adds, changing the subject. "To my ears it sounds fairly graceful. It doesn't sound the way it was conceived, which was kind of nuts and pieces and bolts." Husband Froom's production certainly gives her sound a gently skewed subtlety and edge - an almost exotic air; without him she imagines she might still be making stripped-down, acoustic records more like her first two, "Suzanne Vega" and "Solitude Standing". "We have a terrific working chemistry. The only time that we have gotten into any trouble is if he wants to know what a particular song is about... and then you have the usual, "Well, I don't have to tell you," or, "It's about something that happened a long time ago." That kind of thing. So, she adds coyly, "we had a few intense late-night discussions. Like, I should know what the song is about!" and, "No, you don't have to know what the song is about! I mean, as my husband I suppose he has a right to know, but as my producer he really doesn't. And conversely, when I wrote about our honeymoon, he was not... thrilled. He had one sort of complaint - he would have preferred that the sexy songs were about him and the funny ones about someone else!" After a period out of the limelight, Vega intends for a higher profile in the coming years. "I have plans for three different projects. "Tried and True", which is a singles and hits anthology. "On Demand", which is pieces like the song I did for DNA and other collaborations that I've done. And also an album of early work, which I think could be surprising to a lot of people. I think I would try and put them together as a box set, and also have them available separately. It's probably a good time to look back a little bit, and that would also give me time to work on new songs. I have a bunch of travelling songs I haven't really finished yet. Also rattling around in my brain is a sort of historical romantic novel." Right now, though, radiating a cool, dignified elegance, the 37-year-old Vega is immersed in preparations for a two-month trip to Europe to promote "Nine Objects". A baby daughter (whose name, incidentally, was the inspiration for US band Soul Coughing's album, "Ruby Vroom") and a husband, who for work purposes still has a home in LA, makes for an often frantic schedule. She doesn't, for example, participate in what she calls the "formalised part" of her long-held Buddhist faith as much as she used to. "I do still maintain my altar, though... which has also been harder since Ruby's come around, because now she puts the seven dwarfs up there, so I'll have, like, Sneezy and Dopey sitting next to the incense bowl and candles and offerings." Her laughter is drowned out by shouts and banging from the next room, where equipment is being packed for Europe. In the light of the noise and sub-zero temperatures, plans for a photo shoot on the roof of her apartment are nixed, and we head down to her favoured local coffee bar, the Bell Cafe on Spring Street. On the way, dodging traffic, huddled and scuttling through the icy winds, she looks forward to selling her loft and moving into Greenwich Village. (A cheeky enquiry as to the asking price is rebuffed with a look and not a word, though she does mention that Helen Mirren is scheduled to view it the following week.) On arrival, settling down with the seemingly de rigueur hot cider and exuding an air of warmth and calm, she reflects: "I like where I am now. I think it's about right, because I have the freedom to go places in the world and play. I have the freedom to publish what I like. People who want to know who I am know who I am, and I think I've been given a tremendous amount of respect in the pop world, which is not easy to do, and I've lasted a fairly long time, which is also not easy to do. I think that this is about right for me. Of course, nothing's static, and so I sense that things had been very big and now they're getting smaller, and that bothers me sometimes. But things go up and down, I know that. Nothing stays the same." Submitted by Sharon A. Jennings |
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