She's Got The Fever: Abetted by Mitchell Froom's Inventive Production, Suzanne Vega Has Attained a New Degree of Success
The first snapshot of Suzanne Vega was that of a gentle folk singer whose bland presence matched the cool tone of the revelatory songs on her 1985 self-titled debut album. Solitude Standing, her second LP, skyrocketed on the success of "Luka," Vega's anecdotal hit single about child abuse. By 1990, Vega was co-producing her third record, Days of Open Hand. The record's increasing sonic complexity was a forecast of things to come.
On Vega's new album, 99.9, her frosty voice is the only trace of her earlier days. The record is a noisefest of clangy sound and samples that reflect Vega's desire for growth.
But in conversation, Vega is still a study in control. She steers the conversation away from herself on her emotional state. When questions push the envelope of what she considers acceptable topics, her voice takes on an icy note of impatience bordering on annoyance.
Anger is usually the easiest emotion to feel. But even when discussing anger, Vega displays a sense of distance. "It takes me a lot to get mad," she says with reserve. "I start throwing things. I get very angry." Her dispassion makes it seem as though she's talking about someone else.
The picture of Suzanne Vega throwing things is hard to visualize. But throwing things is exactly what she needs to keep doing. For now, if the interview is any indication, it's the only slice of emotion that she allows to seep out in conversation. She may be 33 years old, but Vega is still in transition. One thing's for sure: if she ever was a gentle folkie in person, she isn't one anymore.
"Self-definition has been my basic problem, ind of in my whole life," says Vega. "I've never really been defined as one thing or another to begin with. I grew up in a half Puerto Rican household, and was raised as a half Puerto Rican although I am actually white."
In spite of an upbringing that Vega describes as "lower-middle-class," she and her siblings--two brothers, one sister--were encouraged to write and dance and pursue art. Vega graduated from prestigious Barnard College, the alma mater of such trailblazing women as Laurie Anderson and Twyla Tharp.
Vega recalls developing artistic tendencies at an early age: "I'm pretty observant," Vega says. "I've always been that way, from the time I can remember. I just noticed things. When I was a kid, my parents seemed very interested when I said that the moon was like a toenail. They looked at me strangely. I wasn't trying to be metaphoric. I meant that the shape of it looked like a toenail. I always had that sort of mind that said "This is like that,' or 'This reminds me of something."
Generally, Vega is reticent to discuss details this personal. She's much more willing to define herself musically. "I'm able to define things more now. When I first started out, I didn't know how to say what I wanted. For example, recording the first album, I'd say, 'It really needs more edge.' And everyone would look at me and say, 'What do you mean?' or 'It has edge' or 'It has enough edge.' Eventually you realize that saying the word edge isn't enough."
99.9 was co-produced by Mitchell Froom, the Zelig-like producer whose name appears on records all over the musical map (Maria McKee, Los Lobos' Kiko, all of Crowded House's records). Froom who has shown himself as producer to be highly sensitive to musicians' individual eccentricities, immediately understood the key to recording Vega's work.
"Once at the dinner table," Vega recalls, "Mitchell said he listened to me talk about my background and the kind of family I grew up in, and he decided that the way to approach this album would be not to keep it pure. He said something about revealing me to be the mutant that I am."
Froom saw the interesting contradictions in Vega's persona. "Suzanne's got strange influences," Froom says. "People hear her voice and her guitar style, they] think she's very soft and pretty and slightly aloof. But if you listen to her words, it's somebody telling you in a quiet voice the most horrifying thing. It's much more unsettling than somebody yelling at you about how horrible everything is. The idea was that the music reflect that particular attitude, reflect the content of the lyric more than just 'the voice and guitar are pretty so we should be pretty'."
Vega's distancing from her old folkie image got a boost when a dance group, DNA, did an unauthorized cover of her a cappella song "Tom's Diner." The song became a big dance floor hit and spawned a whole series of cover versions of it. There were reggae versions, rap versions, comedy versions, even ones done in German and in Swedish. Vega and her record label eventually released the songs in a compilation called Tom's Album. "I didn't mean it as a big statement," she explains. "I did it because it was fun and funny and because all these people were sending me tapes and it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.
"It might have done better," she say ruefully, "except that I forgot to put my name on it. Four months after it came out I suddenly realized that the reason nobody knew what it was is because I didn't put my name on it. I realized the mistake when I saw it listed in a group of other records and it said Various Artists."
Vega ended up befriending DNA -- "They're very funny," she says--and contributed a song, "Salt Water," to their album, Taste This, which came out earlier this year. "I really liked the song I wrote, it has good lyrics. but the record kind of disappeared."
Despite her own production involvement on Days, Vega was disappointed: "I felt that I was getting to be a little too polished, and it was starting to take a long time and I was losing spontaneity.
"with 99.9, I set certain goals and rules for myself; to make each song really different, and each song really short. To hit and run instead of spending a long time on an idea. to have a lot of contrast. To make the loud songs loud and the sad songs sad, and the acoustic songs very acoustic.
"I gave Mitchell a demo tape of something I had done last fall, and the strange thing was that he said, 'It could be a lot edgier.' Then he game me very specific suggestions.
"He said, 'Don't use the big rock and roll drum kit, use small percussive sounds. Use more distortion. Don't be afraid to use distortion and processing of your voice. Having more edge doesn't necessarily mean louder or faster or getting a great big drum sound and hitting it really fast. that would just end up swamping you.' This made me realize he was the right person to make this album with."
The record's variety fulfills Vega's desire to give each song its own character, from the carnival-like atmosphere of "Fat Man and the Little Girl" to the brooding ambiance of "Bad Wisdom." The brisk tempo and sampled elements in the single "Blood Makes Noise" give the songs a techno flavor, which is enhanced by the song's very industrial-looking video. That wasn't necessarily the singer's intention.
"Incorporating dance elements wasn't something I was trying to do," she says somewhat peevishly. "If that were my goal, I would have worked with someone else, because Mitchell has never done dance music. I wasn't going after a dance groove, but I wasn't rejecting it, nor was I sticking to some kind of folk tradition."
Froom is even more vehement. "things that people have said about Suzanne's record just seem like the easy way out," he says. "They're not really listening to it or what it means. Calling it 'industrial' misses the point. In the darker things such as 'Blood Makes Noise' or 'Bad Wisdom,' the sound that's going on is supposed to be the sound going on in the person's head. It's an internal sound. The worst is when people say it has a 'kitchen sink production' wit h just a whole bunch of wacky noises. That sort of thing is my biggest fear. That you would conceive of music as a way to be wacky or wild...I hate wacky music."
After the prolonged production of Days, Vega was thrilled with how quickly she and Froom resolved 99.9. After a week and a half, I knew which songs were going to be on the album and how they were going to sound. It was wild, I had never worked so fast in my whole life."
Their efficiency surprised Froom, as well. "I think it was a good time for her. I really liked the stuff that she brought forward. It required some thought before we went to work, but once we got to work, things happened incredibly quickly."
Speedy recording sessions released Vega from over intellectualizing the process. "People don't realize that I've done a lot of different kinds of performing. Most of my training was as a dancer. And then after that I was trained a bit in the theater. Actually, I'm not trained at all as a musician, and very little as a singer.
"Now I'm trying to put the whole thing together. I used to love the way it felt to dance on stage. I don't get that feeling when I sing. It's a feeling of losing yourself. I've never been able to find that with music, because I still, for whatever reasons"--and she stops here for a second, uncertain--"I still haven't been able to take it out of being very intellectual. And that's what I'm always trying to do on stage--take it another step, move it more into my body and into my movements, and not so much through my brain and through my mouth."
On the day of this interview, Vega had seen an article in The New York Times about the Riot Grrl movement bubbling up in cities across the country. Riot Grrls are new wave of young female activists who combine the principles of feminism with the punk ethic. Somehow, it didn't come as a surprise that she would be intrigued by the concept of young teenage girls applying the do-it-yourself thic with bands and fanzines and crudely drawn words on their bodies.
"I think if I were a teenager now," she muses, "the Riot Grrl movement is something I would be very interested in. When I was sixteen, we had Patti Smith, but it wasn't like a grassroots thing. It wasn't something I felt I could participate in. A lot of women in their late twenties or thirties, like I am, if this kind of thing had been happening,m it would have been interesting."
If she were a young teen now, perhaps Vega might be albe to escape her intellect, to get so personally involved that, like the young Riot Grrls, she would write "SLUT" across her chest in black magic marker. Perhaps one day she will. But she's not there yet.
"I put it into my music. I'm not interested in being a shocking or controversial figure myself. Anybody can be shocking or controversial. I would rather put shocking things in my songs.
"Shock may have more impact," she acknowledges. "With an act like Sinead O'Connor ripping up the picture of the pope, everyone responded. I'm not saying she should or she shouldn't. I'm just saying right now that the way I prefer to do it is to load it all into the music, to put it all into the songs and work. I'm not presenting my private life for analysis. That's not the show."
Submitted by Wendy Chapman
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