THE SONG STARTS off with a scratchy, percussive blip, like a needle stuck in a beat-up old record. The beat picks up with a looping bass line and and a crackly, percussive "thhhwppppp! thhhwppppp!"

A clipped. distorted yell appears for a micro-seeond, along with a bird whistle. A voice starts rap/singing about the megaphone man and the International Fun Boy, and it all wells up into a big, grand Beatlesque chorus.

Vat is? The newest hip-hop kid on the block? James Brown's latest groove? Skinny Puppy's long awaited ode to the circus?

Nope -- it's Suzanne Vega. The tune in question is called Fat Man and The Dancing Girl, and it's a pretty good example of the sonic experiments on her latest album, 99.9 F.

Working with producer Mitchell Froom and his hand-picked crew of musical aces (including guitarist David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, bassist Bruce Thomas of the Attractions and drummer Jerry Marotta). Vega has come up with her most aurally adventurous disc, one that's light years away from her folk singer roots.

The percussion on songs like Rock in This Pocket and Blood Makes Noise sounds metallic, industrial, like a blacksmith laying down the beat on his anvil. On When Heroes Go Down, the vocals are double tracked slightly out of sync, giving a slightiy jarring effect to the short, sharp,pop-rocker. Song of Sand starts off like a simple acoustic folk song, then is joined by a string quartet.

Over the phone from her home in New York City, Vega says the idea was to let go a little, to be more spontaneous than in the past.

"Most of all it was a question of not censoring ourselves, not feeling limited to anything we had done before," relates the 32-year-old, who appears at the Commomodore Wednesday.

"It wasn't so much a question of experimenting as it was a question of letting go a little bit, not being quite as self-conscious. The last record (Days of Open Hand) took me a year to produce and record. We were very careful with it, very painstaking with it. I'm happy that we did that, but I remember thinking at the end that the next time I made an album, I really wanted it to be much more spontaneous, to have more of a spontaneous energy about it."

Lyrically, several songs grew out of Vega's reunion with her biological father, whom she hadn't seen since infancy.

Blood Sings-the folkiest song onthe album - was inspired by photographs of an uncle she never actually met, an uncle who bore a striking resemblance to the singer.

"I think (my father) kept every family photograph that was ever taken, and he sent me copies of all of them," relates Vega.

"I had some of my uncle's childhood photographs, all the way through to just before he died. He ended up homeless. actually, it was a very tragic life that he had - very sad, a very short life. You see yourself in this person's face, and it's a very moving and strange experience."

Fat Man and Dancing Girl, on the other hand, was inspired by Vega's grandmother.

"My grandmother was a drummer in an all-girls band on the vaudeville circuit," she explains. Her father sent her some snaps from those days.

"One of the flyers just has this great language, it's like the Billy Pearl Band and he's billed as the International Fun Boy, and the All Girl Jazz Band is part of the attractions.

"I just really loved the whole idea ... she spent most of her life on the road, and so did my grandfather. She was the drummer, and he was the trumpet player, and the two of them got married and had four children in five years. Then he left the family."

What was it like meeting her father (whom she found through a private detective) after 30 years?

"Very, very strange," she replies.

BECAUSE THERE were certain qualities that were unmistakable. He was unmistakably my father, but he didn't especially look like me or look the way I thought he would. But at the same time I looked at his eyes and saw that our eyes were the same, I saw that our hands were the same, that our skin color was the same. It was very strange. Those things that you take for granted, that people look like you, when you've grown up without that... it's very strange."

Did he know that you were "Suzanne Vega"?

"No he didn't, I had a different name on my birth certificate when I was born. In fact, when I first spoke to him he said "there's a singer with your name." I said "Yeah, that's me." He said 'Luka, that's you?' I said 'Yeah.'

"He was very surprised, because he had only found out about his mother right before I called him. [Her father was adopted.] In the space of two years, he found out that his mother had been a musician on the road and his daughter was a musician on the road."

Back to the album. Bad Wisdom is this year's Luka, a gentle, moving song about a child afflicted with an undisclosed problem.

"It is in the Luka vein, but it's also more inclusive. This time I meant to show how people in that situation - and of course I haven't said what situation - are isolated from everybody, from their family all the way through to their school up to politicians, and how a person like that doesn't really fit into society, at all.

"THE STRANGE thing for me has been to see how many people have interpreted it in different ways, and how many of,them are fitting, too. Some people think the girl has AIDS, some people think the girl is pregnant and needs an abortion. Some people think that she's been sexually molested, that the problem is incest,that it's another case of abuse.

"The weird thing to me is seeing how all those things are related," she notes ' "In fact I had another verse to the song in which the problem was spelled out explicitly. I had to take it out, because I felt that it made it very.heavy-handed.

"Sometimes I think it is more powerful to leave the thing out, especially because that's the way those things manifest themselves. In real life, no one comes to you and says 'look.'

"In Luka, for example, I don't think it would have been the same song if Luka was saying 'My name is Luka, I live on the second floor, I'm an abused child.'. . . If I heard a song like that, I would just turn it off, I wouldn't be interested, I'm doing what I feel is right to me with these topics. Because they're very explosive topics; you have to be careful how you use something like that."

Just in case you were wondering, there is a real-life Luka who used to live in Vega's apartment building in the Big Apple.

"I always wondered if I would get a letter from him or something," she says. "He was about nine when I wrote the song. A few years later when he was about 15 he knocked on the door of the apartment where I used to live. There was a girl with him, and he said 'Would you please tell this girl that Suzanne Vega really did live here?' I think he was using it as a way to get dates.

"The other thing I should mention is that he himself was not abused, he was not an abused child at all. He was just A kid who I knew from the neighborhood.

Because I never expected the song to be a hit, I didn't have any [problem] with taking his name, because I thought no one would ever hear the song. But it doesn't seem to have harmed him in any way: he seems rather pleased."

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Submitted by Julie Chan

VegaNet@aol.com