Surrealism isn't a word that crops up often in discussions of modern music. But then Suzanne Vega - who describes her latest album as surrealistic - isn't your average everyday pop star. Vega has made a career out of taking the challenging artistic route to success, constantly refining her musical style and thinking up inventive new ways of telling a story,

She arrived on the scene in 1985, introducing the noveau folk movement to a new generation of earnest young listeners. In 1987, she had one of the surprise hits of the past decade with "Luka," a song about child abuse. And her latest album, Days Of Open Hand, is filled with surrealistic images that she shaped into a lyrical colage for tunes like "Tired Of Sleeping" and "Book Of Dreams."

"I was mostly trying to stretch my boundaries and not write typical narrative songs," says the 30-year old New Yorker, who plays the Queen Elizabeth Theater Saturday. "I felt that I had done that for a long time, written things like "Tom's Diner," even "Ironbound," "The Queen and The Soldier," "Gypsy"... those to me are narrative songs, they have a narrative, they tell a story. I wanted to take different images and put them together in order to create a mood that was different... something a little less mental and a little more emotional."

Vega likes to experiment with songwriting techniques. "There's many ways of going about a certain subject," she says, expanding on the idea. "You can take this topic of child abuse, for example, and you can either say 'child abuse is bad. We must not beat our kids,' and I can guarantee you that no one is going to listen to a song like that, because everyone knows that this is true and it hasn't prevented anyone from doing anything about it. Or you can do it in different ways...

"What I try to do in a song is find a way that will make the person listening interested. I think that's probably why I tend to use the "I," "me," and "you," as opposed to things that are more sort of declarative.

,"To me, it's got to be unusual, it's got to be something you've never heard before. Why do I want to write a song that says, "I love you baby, come over to my house?" I might feel that way, but I wouldn't write it down because I've heard that kind of song a million times before."

After surprising the music industry by rising to number three on the Billboard charts Stateside with Luka and selling 3.5 million copies of her second album, Solitude Standing, Vega disappeared from view for a while, taking her time to write and record the followup disc. Part of the time was spent recuperating from a year-long world tour, but she also dealt with some personal matters - like meeting her genetic father for the first time.

Her mother and father split up when she was an infant, and she grew up thinking her stepfather was her biological dad. After she learned the true story, the thought of meeting her long-lost kin nagged at her until she finally hired a detective to find him following the success of Luka.

"It was about as weird as you'd expect it to be. It was interesting; I was happy that I did it," she says. "It's one of those things I suspect is like having a child. To you, it's fascinating and interesting, because you've found a piece of yourself ... I don't know how someone else who hasn't been through the same situation would perceive it, but for me it was very fascinating and still a little eerie."

Once she got the songs together for Days Of Open Hand, Vega opted to co-produce the album with her keyboardist, Anton Sanko: a process that took a while (a year from start to finish), but was rewarding.

"I think [producing it themselves] made us feel more confident, and I think it also allowed us to include more things than we would have normally - different kinds of sounds, different kinds of percusssion, different instruments," she says.

"We felt very free to experiment with sounds, and I think that's one of the main differences.

"I wanted the album to have a lot of contrasts. Because the last album had a certain [sound] ... if you use the same band and the same guys, you're gonna get the same sound most of the time ... Rather than imposing the same sound on each song, we tried to make each one unique."

A good example is 50/50 Chance, a striking song about a friend's attempted suicide. Phillip Glass's string arrangement lends an urgency to the song, heightening the tension - Will she die? If she lives, will she try it again? - in the lyric.

"It was based on a real incident last year that happened with someone who was very close to me. It was an attemipted suicide - she's living today and feeling fine, she's not in that state of mind anymore - but it was based on a real incident.

"I decided to use Phillip Glass on that particular song because the band decided they didn't feel it was appropriate if they played on it, which I agreed with. I'd been talking to Phillip Glass for years about doing a string arrangement with him, ever since we'd worked together on Songs From Liquid Days... I thought that would be a good one, because I knew that he wouldn't be sentimental about it."

One of the album's more universally applicable lyrics is found in Institution Green, which sums up the malaise and alienation of standing or waiting in line in a modern institution.

"It was based on the 1988 presidential election, and sitting in a doctor's office waiting to get your blood taken," says Vega. "If you stay in one of those rooms for an hour and a half and no one's looking at you, you start to wonder if you really exist. And all of the [institutional] rooms in America seem to be painted the same shade of olive green that I think is supposed to be restful. Basically, it's a song about bureaucracy and institutions; not necessarily mental ones, the normal ones of everyday life."

Aside from the purely aural delights to be found in her songs, Days of Open Hand has a strong visual component: Each song is accompanied by a collage by Geof Kurn, an artist from Dallas. Kurn employs a variety of objects - bent clothes hangers, pills, safety pins, watches and a variety of hands - to fine surrealistic effect.

"One of the things that I enjoy about CDs and album covers is looking at the artwork, and so you assume that the artwork has something to do with the content inside. This time, I did feel that the artwork kind of correctly showed the surrealistic feeling of the songs, and I know I there's a lot of sort of objects in my songs, people turning into things. things becoming alive, and I really liked the way this guy worked. He does these collages that have this surrealistic feeling, but are also very contemporary, so I thought he'd be the perfect guy to do the artwork."

Listening-wise, she says she's impressed by the latter day work of people like Leonard Cohen, Peter Gabriel, and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs. She feels some affinity with the new folk movement ("I mean, I've been part of the folk scene in New York for a really long time"), but, feels "folk" is too big a term to really classify as one movement.

"I think it's a mistake to think of folk as one blanket category, because there's people doing traditional folk, and I don't really feel much connection with that, obviously I don't sing those kind of songs. There are other people who sing urban folk, and I suppose I have more of a connection with that, or people who are doing more literary kinds of songwriting. But we all do play acoustic guitar, and I suppose that's our common thread."

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Submitted by Julie Chan

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