The Speakeasy, a folk club on MacDougal Street, was boisterous as usual that summer night in 1982. Songwriters were talking at the bar, and customers were drinking at the tables, not paying much attention to the performers. Christine Lavin, a folk singer and gregarious fixture of the Village scene, was sitting with an old boyfriend in the back of the room when she noticed a slight, pale young woman with an angular face and straight blonde hair standing on the little stage.

"The crowd was making a lot of noise," says Lavin. "She stood there, silent, tuned her guitar, and just stood. Slowly the place got quiet, then totally silent. Then she starteed to play. it was amazing: Just by being quiet and focused, she pulled the room to her. that was the first time I ever saw Suzanne Vega."

Vega played ringing acoustic guitar that night, and sang - in a smooth soprano - some lovely, fairly conventional folk songs she'd written: a Homeric ballad called "Calypso," a love song called "Gypsy," a medieval allegory called "The Queen and the Soldier." But one song sounded different - "Cracking," a deadpan folk rap about a woman walking through the city while both of them fall apart. "She was hypnotic," says Lavin.

Four years later, Vega took the stage stage at London's Royal Albert Hall. She came out, said nothing and started to play. This time, her acoustic guitar was joined by an electric one, a bass, a synthesizer, and drums. But even with the layered rock backing, her voice was intimate, a clean whisper in your ear. She riveted the crowd of 5,000 with a quiet composition called "Small Blue Thing," a piece of writing light-years beyond her early knight-and-queen stuff, a song that takes a feeling and gives it color, shape and texture.

Today I am
a small blue thing
Made of china
made of glass
I am cool and smooth and curious
I never blink
I am turning in your hand
Turning in your hand.

WHEN VEGA GRADUATED from Barnard College in 1982, she was a promising, somewhat precious neo-folk singer-songwriter, a girl with a guitar and icy powers of expression. Today, at 27, she's an even more formidable writer and performer with a crack band, a huge following overseas and a large one in this country. When A&M released her first album, in 1985, the company expected to sell around 30,000 copies. So far, Suzanne Vega has sold 250,000 copies here and 550,000 more abroad. A single from the album, "Marlene on the Wall," (in which the "mocking smile" in a Deitrich photo watches a woman grappling with love), was a hit in Britain and Holland. "Left of Center," a song she wrote for the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, climbed the British pop charts.

Next week, when A&M releases her second album, Solitude Standing, Vega is likely to become a recogniz star in this country as well. She'll play the Shubert Theater on May 3 and Carnegie Hall in July, then tour the United States and the world. But Vega is not a musician whose worth can be measured in record sales or concert attendance figures.

"Solitude Standing" is a thing of great beauty, an album that seems destined to be around decades from now. Apart from her older ballads, "Calypso" and "Gypsy," the songs are modernist, point-of-view pieces, pared down character studies a world away from the whiny, confessional songs of seventies singer-songwriters. Vega's work manages to be both detached and passionate - cooly observed moments of deep emotionor isolation, the kind of lyrics Joni Mitchell might write if she were also Lou Reed.

In "Tom's Diner," set in a Columbia students' hangout on Boradway and 112th Street, a man drinks coffee, leafs through the paper, watches everything and connects with nothing. In "Ironbound," a woman walks thorough Newark's poulty district, watching men sell thighs and breasts. "Luka," the first single, is a chiming, sinuous pop song - strong backbeat, catchy hook-about child abuse, written and sung in the resigned voice of a tough, battered little boy:

I guess I'd like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown
Just don't ask me how I am
Just don't ask me how I am
Just don't ask me how I am.

VEGA LIVES ALONE ON THE edge of Manhattan Island, next to the Hudson in the far West Village. Bundled up against a day that isn't cold, she walks to a Mexican restaurant for a lunch of tortilla soup and coffee. She wears a white sweatshirt under a black jumper, no makeup except some red on her lips. Her hair is cut simply and left alone. Though her onstage persona is cool and aloof, in person she is warm, and seems full of self-doubt.

For thirteen years, Vega has praciced a form of Buddhism, and she is controlled: a steady gray gaze,a crisp voice speaks in well-formed paragraphs about the past year of her life, when she found her audience but also encountered the kinds of growing pains that have derailed many young careers.

"In my writing," she says, "I had a dry spell for two years. It was kind of scary. It's always scary-after I write a song, I'm ecstatic for a day. Then I think, 'Oh no, maybe that was the last one.' After it had been two years, I started to think, 'Maybe I should just quit. That'll surprise them.' There was something perverse in me that wanted to walk away. That would have been the coward's way out."

When the songs finally started coming again, she wasn't sure if they were any good. "A number of songs on my first album-'Marlene on the Wall,' for example-I thought were horrible when I wrote them." When she first played "Marlene"-reluctantly-at the Beacon Theater in 1984, the audience told her how good it was. But when Vega was writing for her second album, she, didn't have an audience to guide her.

"When I went into the studio, three of the songs hadn't been written, and I didn't know about the rest," she says. "Then I lost my drummer. I felt like someone had come along and shaved off all my hair."

But once Vega was inside Bearsville Studio, in Woodstock, with her band :nd her co-producers, Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye, everything fell into place. A new drummer proved adept, and the group-which had been criticized for being too restrained-found its sound. No longer an obligatory backup band, it was an ensemble that added meaning to each song. Vega shut herself in a room and wrote the last three songs on deadline, including "Solitude Standing," which gave the album its title.

She even found inspiration in her writer's block. In "Language," she explains the problem:

Words are too solid ...
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
I won't use words again
They don't mean what I meant
They don't say what I said
they're just the crust ...

"It's what I was going through these last couple of years," says Vega. "How do you find the words to say what you mean?" If all this sounds a bit abstract, it's not. Vega's intelligence is balanced by her passion. Onstage, though she barely moves while performing, she sometimes seems tempted to cut loose, grab a Stratocaster, and squeeze out a solo. But she never does.

"That undercurrent of sensuality is the key to her art"' says Kaye who played in Patti Smith's band when Smith turned from poetry to rock and roll. "There's a wash of emotion under there that's always kept under her watchful eye. It stops her from being an introspective girl with a guitar."

"Suzanne," says Christine Lavin, "is a closet rock-and-roller."

VEGA'S FAMILY MOVED from Santa Monica to East 109th Street in 1962, and then to West 105th. Her stepfather is a novelist and teacher; her mother, a computer analyst. Vega grew up an outsider who learned to read the streets. Later, as a shy dance student at Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts, she found the power in her own silence. "Everyone was extroverted, hyperactive," she says. "I didn't have the personality to compete. So I learned how to get people to notice me by saying and doing nothing. I still do that, onstage.

"My body was never the way I wanted it- I wanted it strong and spare with no extra stuff, and I was heavy. But in my room playing guitar, I could do with my words what I couldn't with my body."

She started writing at fourteen, in 1974, filling notebook after notebook with nicely rhymed, "horribly corny" songs. She sang in church coffeehouses, and by 1977, while her peers were discovering the Talking Heads, she was entering Barnard and "feeling like the only folk singer in the world."

Vega might seem like an introspective girt with a guitar were it not for the Lou Reed concert she saw in 1979. It was her first rock concert. "It was very disturbing," she says. "I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was pretty violent-throwing lighted cigarettes into the audience, smashing equipment."

More than his anger, it was Reed's songwriting-sharp narratives and dialogues-that impressed Vega. "He changed me. I'd been doing songs like 'Gypsy' and 'Calypso.' He made me realize the door was wide open. You didn't need a melody if you didn't want. You don't have to tell the whole story, or even make logical sense." Vega soon wrote "Cracking," her deadpan rap, and "Neighborhood Girls," a Reed-like song about prostitution, based on talk she heard on the IRT. And she headed for the Village.

By the time she was out of college and working as a receptionist, Vega had a following in the Village. She gave Folk City---where Bob Dylan got his start-an audition tape, got a gig, and took the stage. Her persona was in place. Her songs were striking-she'd use two words where others would use ten. And there was something else.

"No one else had her focus and determination," says Robbie Woliver, then a co-owner of Folk City. "I think her image was as important to her success as her music. I call it New Waif."

"I felt I had found my place," says Vega. "I wasn't isolated anymore." In late 1981, the Village folk scene found a new home - the SpeakEasy, a small, relaxed place where songwriters congregated. Vega eventually found herself becoming a symbol, and wasn't sure she liked it-she wasn't sure what she was. "Someone would say, 'You're obviously a traditional folk singer,' and I'd say, 'Oh, but I'm not.' Or they'd say, 'You're not a folk singer at all,' and I'd say, 'Oh, but I am.' "

Around that time, a musician named Steve Addabbo formed a music-management partnership with a lawyer named Ron Fierstein (Harvey's brother). They searched for a promising act, saw Vega, and signed her up. Addabbo put together (and played in) the first band, and Fierstein invested money and handled the business side. They got A&M interested, then got Vega to quit her day job. There were demos, rejections, gigs with lines around the block, more demos, and finally, a recording contract.

Inevitably, when Vega moved bevond the Village, there was envy among some she'd left behind-a feeling that she had "abandoned" the scene, "betrayed" the music. But Vega's music, no matter what form it takes, is folk in the sense that Woody Guthrie, hip-hop, or R.E.M. is folk - music in which the song is more important than the singer. Vega isn't bothered by the criticism, though she misses the community. "It was fun," she says. "Later, it lost some focus. Now I'm not sure what's happening there."

When she met Lou Reed at the York Music Awards in March 1986, her emergence from the scene was complete. Reed had been following her career.

"I see you've added a drummer," he said. He seemed pleased.

Reed's onstage abandon was on Vega's mind during a gig she did at the Bottom Line last May. "Some days I wish I were Lou Reed," she told the audience. Now she says, "I meant so I could just break loose onstage. which I don't ever really do. I'd like to, but I can't sing, play guitar, and move at the same time. I'm too nervous. It takes.all my concentration to play guitar. If I move, I'll forget what the next chord is supposed to be. Maybe when I'm better, I'll get more relaxed."

"Suzanne is one of the more articulate new songwriters," says Reed. "I'll be interested in hearing what happens if there's less folk and more rock."

VEGA'S BAND IS REHEARSING three days before the first stop on the tour-a practice gig at a New Haven club called Toad's. In black jeans and a black pullover, Vega stands-without her guitar-and sings "Left of Center." Then she says, "How come I never feel like dancing when I perform?"

They play a few more songs. Guided by Addabbo, they adjust the tempo on this one, the guitar effects on that. They go into "Solitude Standing"-thumping, minor-key music with a big drum sound. "Solitude stands in the doorway," Vega sings. "I'm struck once again by her black silhouette." But something's wrong: Inside all that music, her voice has lost its whispering intimacy. The song ends.

"Pretty good." says Addabbo. Vega makes a face. "No, it was okay," he says.

"I have to settle," says Vega, and while the band discusses the problem. she finger-picks her guitar slowly, and breathes words into her microphone:

And she says 'I've come to set a twisted thing straight'

And she says 'I've come to lighten this dark heart'

With startling strength and purity, her voice and guitar float above the talking and the buzz of electric guitars at rest, and she seems--suddenly-settled. A listener wonders about those electric instruments. She has all the power she needs without them.

AT TOAD'S, VEGA SHOWS OFF that power, singing a cappella, with guitar only, with the full band. This time, "Solitude Standing" starts out as loud as before, but then the music lifts like a veil, giving Vega's clear, confidential voice all the room it needs. The dynamic is just right. Later, the packed audience claps and hoots for an encore. Vega comes back onstage and stands there with a pleased. nervous smile.

"Relax, we love you," calls a voice.

"I am," says Vega, losing some of her cool. "This is the re- ... the m-most relaxed I've ever been."

That gets the biggest cheer of all.

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Submitted by Julie Chan

VegaNet@aol.com