FROM THE VAULT – SEPTEMBER 1996

Inescapably, the image that still hangs the most of Suzanne Vega is old, six or seven years. It’s got something to do with bohemianism or, more precisely, the romance of bohemianism. And a lot more to do with her loft in New York. It’s indefinably young and ineffably timeless.

Somehow, Suzanne Vega is not about growing old. Or maybe Suzanne Vega is about growing old with her.

Here we are in ‘96 staring at the slick of Nine Objects Of Desire and dreaming of Caramel with a woman who has a haunting semblance, not so much in the way she looks, but in character to the late Nico or Marianne Faithfull of 10 years ago. Great chanteuses both; great tortured woman both. Vega isn’t tortured but she’s becoming great, albeit on a skinny five album history strung out over 11 years.

At 37, Suzanne Vega has found attitude. Confidence, at the very least. She’s no longer the wistful folky mixing her muses - poetry and lyricism - with a darkly-tinged realism that foraged in the twisted psyche of her characters or her bubbled like blood at 99.9F.

Some of that has to do with marriage and motherhood, both offer new dawnings of perception. Rich experiences, earthily organic as it gets. And she seems older by them. Nine is older too; very old in its throwback to childhood roots rhythms and smart jazz and brass chopped pop. Marlene On the Wall must be mystified by what has become of her creator. “Luka” would be wondering where the coffee house folkie of Tom’s Diner got off the streets and stopped pondering pensively, scribbling frantically, in her loft.


And she is old in her ways too. Then again, she always has been older than her years. Talk to her anytime over the past decade and age sniffs around that baby face with its bob of hair and underlying nervousness. Her wedding day pic shows a woman wrapped in a dress of ages. It could have been taken in the 1920s or 30s or ’40s …

That’s what’s confusing about Suzanne Vega - time. She does and doesn’t belong in this and others. That’s what’s enchanting about Suzanne Vega - and admitting to being enchanted is easy. Just like her concerts and her funny/sad/lifely songs that throw smatterings of sugar’n’spice and not everything that’s nice in a souffle of imagery.

Her new record is wonderful because of all those things. Even if it did take four years. And she is still captivating, not the least because she still twists in her own sobriety (the song alluded to could have been written about her).

Married to her producer Mitchell Froom with a toddling daughter Ruby, the auburn-haired, blue-eyed, alabaster-skinned Vega reads, on paper, as “thirty-something”.

As it turns out, not quite so. She sounds so much more confident these days. Back in the mid- and late ’80s, conversations were pregnant with as much between the lines as they were with what was said; heavily laced with what was either pure nervous uncertainty or simple distrust and a recluse’s right to privacy. Somehow Vega never wore fame - or at least the shards of it - well.

Now she leaps into conversation with a certainty and ‘this is what I want you to know’ conviction. We’re talking perspectives, here, how “Nine” seems to have a horizon broader than that framed by the New York skyline she so perfectly meandered and rhymed in her youth.

“This album might have a broader perspective, might have more of a world perspective because I find first of all … umm, I live in New York like I always have; my husband lives in LA, which didn’t seem like a problem at the time.

“It seemed like ‘well, we love each other, we’ll get married, not a problem’ but I find I’m not at home as much as I used to be. I spend time in LA, I spend time in Europe, I spend time travelling so we can be together as a family. I don’t spend time in Tom’s Diner as much as I used to or walking the same streets but I always return there because I feel like I need to and I really love it there and it does help my writing to go back.”

Get back to where you once belong, chorused the Fab Four, so many decades ago; Vega wrote In Liverpool - it remains one of her most charming songs. A snapshot taken straight from the camera of the mind’s eye. She’s good at snapshots. At a guess, Nine Objects Of Desire is a snapshot of much more of her life than she’s owned up to before.

And she gets back to where she once belonged. Born a Leo on August 12, 1959, on Upper West Side, New York, from half-Puerto Rican parents she found Latin rhythms at an early age. If she shuffled a samba as a kid to those all-night Puerto Rican and Cuban groove nights she’s now the mistress of the night, on stage looking out at another generation of small shufflers, wide-eyed with the excitement and sweat of the dance. Only now it’s multi-cultural. White rock’n'pop smacked by hot beats; a rare voodoo.

“Well, for some reason, this time it felt really rational to use the Latin rhythms that I grew up with,” she says. “I think for along time I was suppressing them and trying not to have them come out in the music. This time it felt really natural and the record has a seductive feeling and a more sensual quality than some of the other records do.

“For instance, there’s a song called ‘Lolita’ where Mitchell had the rhythm already and I had most of the words already and we attempted to do a sound like War used to. They were a kind of an LA band that was also very popular in New York when I was growing up. It had a very Latin sound, a very street Latin sound, kind of a mixture of Latin and American, so it felt very rational for me to sing that song over that rhythm.

“But we were attempting to do something like War, like Santana, because they were the groups I had listened to.”

The uninitiated should immediately refer to the albums Eric Burdon Declares War (1970) and Black Man’s Burdon (1971) in which the former Animals lead singer hooked up with the Lonnie Jordan and Lee Oskar-led former Creators and then Night Shift from Long Beach, California, and spawned some seriously heavy r’n'b/soul and the stunning hit Spill The Wine. Soon after they went their separate ways and War emerged in their own right finally scoring in early ‘76 with the classic Low Rider. Search out The World Is A Ghetto, War Live, Why Can’t We Be Friends and the compilations Greatest Hits and Platinum Jazz for some serious grooves.

Meanwhile, Vega is still explaining the rather vast world she and Froom hauled and embraced with Nine Objects Of Desire, the cover of which features her staring one-eyed and rather charmingly at the lens while obscuring her other eye with a green apple. This is neither a take on the old William Tell theme or a statement about the original sin as half the Catholic world apparently hopes or has concluded. No, the truth is much fruitier. Plums, her preferred choice, were out of season. And there is also a ripe little album-ending track called My Favourite Plum.

It is, of course, all symbolic: “The plum is the object of desire to end all objects, the one thing you really want but don’t have - the job, the husband, the apartment, the fame, the guy, the girl, the answer that’s right out of reach.” A few moments later she happily explains that despite there being 12 tracks, there are only nine objects of desire because two of the tracks she wrote for her husband, two for her daughter and two for “the figure of death”.

Not that Froom was immediately enamoured by Honeymoon Suite. “Slightly embarrassed” is how she describes his reaction, “but he got used to it”. Her daughter, she says, prefers other tracks on the album “but in the end that doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to hold the song to her and say ‘I wrote this for you and you have to appreciate me because of this’. I hope she does but if she doesn’t that’s the nature of a child. It takes them a while to appreciate things.”

And like all proud mums - it seems odd thinking of Vega as a “mum” - she’s concerned about the world in which we live but surprisingly optimistic. “I think a lot about the world she’s going to grow up in,” she says, “and I really hope I can shield her from suffering.

“I think that there are a lot of good things in the world today. People are becoming more aware of the need to preserve the world and the natural world and I think they’re becoming more aware that we have to respect one another as human beings. Groups like Amnesty International are very important because they keep reminding us that we have to respect one another as human beings and there’s nothing more basic than that.

“So that gives me hope and I think you have to have courage and continue forward even if you feel that there are terrible things that happen in the world.”

And in such a world there is Suzanne Vega, a gypsy drifting shadowy and somehow fulsome between genre, culture and place. Yet assured of her own. Happy to see the rush of Joan Osborne, Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morrisette, Iris DeMent, Amber Sunshower, Bjork and their contemporaries to the various hues in the rainbow of women that have lopped the contemporary muse in the past few years. She listens to them all, admits she judges them, but won’t say who she likes and dislikes “because the press would print it and make a big thing of it”.

No, her whimsy is simply to be what she’s always been, maddeningly and intoxicatingly indefinably Vega. “I feel that music is very current and I feel part of the same scene - in a sense - as those women, but I also know I’ve been doing it a very long time and I feel that I have my own distinct voice.”

Solitude is still standing.