July 11, 1959 - Singer-songwriter. Address: c/o AGF Entertainment Ltd., P.O. Box 2036 Old Chelsea Station. New York, NY 10119; c/o A&M Records Inc., 835 Eighth Ave. 27th fl., New York, NY 10019.
Don't let the deadpan vocals or innocent gaze fool you, Jeremy Hellger wrote in the New York Review of Records [December 1992/January 1993], in introducing his assessment of 99.9 F, the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega's latest album. "Suzanne Vega is a contained maelstrom looking for a place to uncork." Widely regarded as one of the most brilliant songwriters of her generation, Vega emerged as a leading figure of the folk- music revival of the early 1980s when, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she sang what have been labeled contemporary folk or neo-folk songs of her own creation in Greenwich Village clubs.
Since the release of her self-titled, critically acclaimed 1985 debut album, she has given sold-out concerts in many of the world's best-known halls. In performances devoid of outward drama that nevertheless convey deep emotion. Vega sings in a distinctive, clear vibratoless voice that has been described as "a cool, dry sandpaper- brushed near-whisper" and as "plaintive but disarmingly powerful." Bearing the stamp of a masterful storyteller who "observed the world with a clinically poetic eye." In the words of Stephen Holden of the New York Times [April 29, 1987], her songs focus on city life and ordinary people and on such subjects as childhood trauma, child abuse, spiritual or physical illnesses, loneliness and love. Notably succinct and understated, often cerebral but also streetwise, her lyrics invite multiple interpretations.
With the release in 1987 of Solitude Standing, her second album, and in particular, its hit single "Luka", Vega vaulted to a position of prominence in the world of pop music. Inspired in part by the British group DNA's highly successful 1991 remix of "Tom's Diner," another cut from Solitude Standing, Vega ventured into musical territory she had never before explored to create 99.9 F. Without turning her back on her roots in folk music, with 99.9 F, she stretched the boundaries of that genre still further to encompass what has been variously dubbed industrial folk, technofolk, and technofolk rock. Vega is said to have paved the way for such singers as Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, Edie Brickell, Melissa Etheridge, and Shawn Colvin.
Weighing just two and a half pounds when she was born, two months prematurely, on July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California, Suzanne Vega spent the first weeks of her life in an incubator. Her parents divorced before or shortly after her first birthday and for many years she had no contact with her father. In 1988, after learning of his whereabouts from a detective whom she had hired to track him down, she visited him in California, where he earns his livelihood by creating artistic renderings of architectural blueprints.
Vega's mother, a computer program analyst of German-Swedish extraction, remarried in 1960. About a year later she and her second husband, Ed Vega, a Puerto-Rican-born writer and teacher, moved with Suzanne to New York City. Growing up in Hispanic neighborhoods with the three children born to her mother and stepfather Suzanne Vega spoke Spanish as well as English. At the age of nine, she learned that Ed Vega was not her biological father, a discovery that troubled her greatly. "It forced me to reexamine my whole identity." she explained to Anthony Scaduto, who interviewed her for New York Newsday [October 18,1987]. "I felt comfortable with my identity as half Puerto Rican and was proud of it. And to suddenly find out I was white... For a long time I denied I was not half Puerto Rican." Despite that denial, for many years Vega thought of herself as an outsider.
According to an article by Stephen Holden in the New York Times [September 18, 1984], the atmosphere in the Vega household "encouraged all kinds of artistic creativity. "Vega's parents often sang folk songs at home, some with lyrics and music written by Ed Vega, who played the guitar. Suzanne Vega began to pick out chords on the guitar at the age of eleven. At twelve she began to set down her thoughts in a journal and in poems that displayed what she has referred to as her natural ability at rhyme. Two years later she started writing what she has described as "horribly corny" songs. She showed them to her stepfather, who she has said advised her "not to use cliches and to be as honest as [she could]."
The musicians whose recordings Vega found especially instructive and inspirational during her teens included Huddie Ledbetter ["Leadbelly"], Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Odetta, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen. Vega has also spoken with admiration of the vibratoless, jazz technique of the Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and the works of the writer Carson McCullers and the painter Edward Hopper. She has named as especially inspiring to her during her early teens a biography of Bob Dylan. "It seemed to me [Dylan] was one person who had triumphed, who changed his life." she explained to Anthony Scaduto. "So I said, `I'm going to do that'"
Vega has said that Buddhism, to which she and the other members of her family turned in the middle 1970s, aided her development as a person. "It gave me a sense of hope in myself." she told Scaduto "I thought of myself as a really bad person because there was something wrong with me, something missing, a piece of me that was not there. Buddhism got me to see my potential." She has cited the twice-daily chanting in which she has engaged as a follower of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism as influential in her songwriting.
As a student at the High School of Performing Arts, in Manhattan, Vega studied modern dance. She told Eric Pooley for New York [April 27, 1987] that her fellow students tended to be "extroverted" and "hyperactive" and that she did not have "the personality to compete." I learned to get people to notice me by saying and doing nothing." she said. Vega gave her first public vocal performances at informal gatherings at local churches. After enrolling at Barnard College, in New York City, she sang in West Side coffee houses and at folk festivals held at Columbia University. In addition to traditional folk songs, she sang songs she had written herself. "It was excruciating, having people stare at me, "Vega has admitted. "But I felt compelled to sing my songs. There's something in me that says, "You may not like doing this, but you have to do it, so quit fighting it."
By 1978 Vega had built up enough courage to sing in Greenwich Village clubs frequented by folk-music devotees, among them Gerde's Folk City, where Bob Dylan had made his professional debut. Praise from other club performers boosted Vega's confidence, and she relished the feeling of camaraderie that emerged when she joined their songwriting discussions or sessions in which they bounced ideas off one another. "For the first time in my life, I found a scene I was happy in," she disclosed to Anthony Scaduto. " I belonged there ... I fit in."
In 1979 Vega attended a concert that proved to be pivotal in the evolution of her career. The artist was Lou Reed, the so-called godfather of American punk rock. "His performance and his songs shocked me, disturbed me," Vega told Scaduto. "He was the first performer I had ever seen who had acknowledged the lifestyle I grew up in, difficult neighborhoods and people who are violent. His performance kept seeping into my mind and I bought a couple of his records.
I realized I could write songs about things I experienced. The subways, the streets, lonely people, damaged people. I began to see that I could be a contemporary folk singer, maybe opening another chapter. Mix in some other influences like jazz in the music and minimalism in the lyrics,... Fuse folk and minimalism Lou Reed made the link in my mind." Through her study of Reed's work she also realized, she has said, that there is no need to tell "the whole story" in a song, or even to "make logical sense."
After graduating from Barnard College, with a BA degree in English, in 1982, Vega got a daytime job as a receptionist. Her concert schedule grew increasingly crowded, and growing numbers of people began coming to Greenwich Village nightspots to hear her. In a review for the New York Times [September 28, 1984] of one of her sets at Folk City, Stephen Holden wrote, "The freshest and clearest new voice on the New York folk- music scene these days belongs to Suzanne Vega... [She] has the pristine enunciation and ringing, acoustic guitar style that make her an heir to the folk-pop tradition of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. But the introverted, diamond- hard imagery of her song lyrics, many of which describe New York's street life with a photographic objectivity, and her trancelike melodies that favor the whole-tone scale also reflect new-wave and Eastern influences.
Earlier, while performing in 1981 at the Speakeasy, another Greenwich Village club where songwriters gathered, Vega had attracted the attention of Steve Addabbo and Ronald K. Fierstein, who had just formed a musical management partnership. [One source reported that the men approached her after hearing a radio broadcast of a recording made as a cooperative venture by Vega and other Village musicians.] With Addabbo and Fierstein serving as her managers, during the next year she completed the production of a demo tape. In 1983 she landed a contract with A&M Records, which had turned her down twice before. Two years later a collection of ten of her songs, among them "Cracking", "Marlene on the Wall", "Small Blue Thing", "The Queen and the Soldier", and "Neighborhood Girls", was released as Suzanne Vega, her first album.
Critics greeted the album enthusiastically. "[Vega] emerges as the strongest, most decisively shaped songwriting personality to come along in years," John Rockwell wrote in a New York Times [April 14, 1985] review, in which he called the album "a major achievement". In New York Newsday [May 7, 1985], Wayne Robins described it as "one of 1985's most satisfying debuts, a varied yet firmly reined tour de force that puts in sharp focus Vega's multiple assets." "[Vega] is a masterfully economical and literate lyricist whose piercing images repeatedly strike an emotional bull's-eye." he continued. "She's a gifted melodist and an instinctively clever singer whose voice veers, when appropriate, from aloofness to intimacy. Vega's strength is in lean, provocative imagery and unlikely but dazzling metaphors."
In a review of Suzanne Vega for Esquire [November 1985], Sarah Crighton wrote, "With wit, grace, intelligence, and an honestly cruel edge, [Vega] skates past the pitfalls of folk music. While she is often found in the stranglehold of love, she watches herself with irony and unflinching insight. Underneath her cool detachment lies a heat that comes from burrowing beyond defenses to see what lies in her heart and her mind. What Vega finds there is startling, distinctive, true." Much to the surprise of A&M executives, who had anticipated selling 30,000 albums, about 250,000 copies of Suzanne Vega were sold in the United States and more than 500,000 abroad [In England, "Marlene on the Wall" became a hit single]. In its November 1989 issue, Rolling Stone included the album in its list of the one hundred best albums of the 1980s.
Two months after the release of her first album, Vega gave her first live performance with a band. By 1987 her entourage for concert tours to Japan, Australia, and European countries as well as cities in the United States had swelled to more than a dozen people in addition to her four backup musicians.
At such prestigious sites as Royal Albert Hall, in London, Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall, in New York City, and Constitution Hall, in Washington D.C., among many other venues, over the years she has performed before unusually varied audiences. In GQ [December 1987], for example, Stephen Fried reported that those in attendance at one of her concerts included "everyone from reticent women's- college students to dyed-in-the-wool-blend professional couples to mainstream rock and rollers."
According to an article in Esquire [December 1987], "Anyone who has ever heard Vega perform speaks most of the focus and determination, the sheer power of will she brings to the stage." In Jam Entertainment News [September 18. 1992], Craig Michaels wrote that "in concert, she's simply spellbinding, combining superb musicianship with a real flair for entertaining - not just performing, mind you, but entertaining." Reviewers of her concerts have often mentioned her funny banter, avoidance of histrionics and rock-and-roll flash, demure bearing, and highly distinctive voice.
When Bill DeMain asked her during an interview for the Performing Songwriter [May/June 1984] how she had developed her singing style, Vega responded that even as a youngster, she had "preferred voices that were very direct ... very straightforward," citing as examples those of Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and Lotte Lenya. "So that's what I tried to do. I just tried to make my voice come out in the simplest way possible."
In 1986 Vega wrote the lyrics for two pieces in the composer Philip Glass's orchestral song cycle Songs for Liquid Days, and she contributed "Left of Center", a song about a nonconforming teenager, to the soundtrack of John Hughes's film Pretty in Pink. The concept for "Left of Center", Vega told Bill DeMain, grew out of the title phrase itself.
In addition to random words and phrases, her observations of people and events in urban settings, and her own experiences and ruminations, she has said that her sources of inspiration in songwriting include, nursery rhymes, children's street games, bits of information she comes across and medical and scientific textbooks. She has also said that early on she chose to write in short phrases because she wanted "to do something different that was more urban" and "to write like a good writer, to the point and punchy in words that were vivid". "Those shorter phrases seemed to hit harder," she explained to Bill DeMain. "They were more satisfying to sing. "She told DeMain that she believes that in developing her writing style, she was also unconsciously accommodating her asthma-related inability to hold long notes.
By her own account, for much of the latter half of 1985 and at least part of 1986, Vega experienced writer's block, which, in conversation with Vivian Goldman of the London Observer [May 17, 198?], she attributed to a loss of confidence. "Success threw me for a loop", she explained; "I hadn't expected it." The release of Solitude Standing (1987), her second album, provided ample evidence that Vega's creative juices had resumed flowing vigorously.
Offering a richer musical accompaniment than its predecessor, it hit the pop charts in Great Britain at number two and, in the United States, reached number eleven on Billboard's album chart and number six on its compact-disc chart. Ultimately, more than three million copies of the album were purchased worldwide. Critics as well as record buyers expressed admiration for Solitude Standing. In a representative assessment, Eric Pooley described it as "a thing of great beauty" and the songs, with the exception of a couple of older ballads, as "modernist, point-of-view pieces, pored-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," he wrote, "coolly observed moments of deep emotion or isolation."
In addition to the title song, Solitude Standing offered such popular Vega works as "Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song)," "Ironbound/Fancy Poultry", "Calypso", "Language", "Gypsy", and what may be her best-known songs to date - "Luka" and "Tom's Diner". In "Tom's Diner", she presented, in an a capella prose poem, a succession of images described by a patron who has come to the diner for breakfast. The song inspired various musical groups to create their own renditions, one of which, an unauthorized hip-hop dance remix by the British rappers DNA, became a worldwide hit. In 1991 A&M released DNA's version, along with those of other groups from around the world, in a collection entitled Tom's Diner. "I was pleased that "Tom's Diner" did what it did, because suddenly all these black kids in the neighborhood where I grew up in New York were listening to my songs", Vega once commended.
Vega has said that she wrote "Luka" after pondering the idea for the song for months. An elliptical tale of child abuse set to a disarmingly cheerful melody (arranged for the most part by the keyboardist Anton Sanko), it is a monologue sung by the young, eponymous victim. The child attempts to deny and rationalize his situation and to keep at bay the suspicions of neighbors who may have seen his bruises or heard sounds of violence emanating from his family's apartment. "I didn't want "Luka" to be a self-pitying song about a boy sitting on a stoop feeling miserable", Vega told Anthony Scaduto. "That kid had a dignity, as kids do, and that's what I wanted to come out. The strength, the backbone... All I wanted to do was reveal his point of view. [The song is] unresolved, frustrating, like it is in real life. By leaving it ambiguous, it makes people think twice about it."
During her conversation with Bill DeMain, Vega described another aspect of her approach in writing "Luka": "The audience in the song is the neighbor. So it was kind of writing a play. First of all, how do you introduce the character? You do that by saying, 'My name is Luka. I live on the second floor.' And then you get the audience involved, saying, "I live upstairs from you. So you've seen me before.' You're incriminating the audience. You're pointing the finger without really doing it. You're unfolding this story that can't really be told and you're involving the audience in it and that was what I wanted to do."
Despite the seriousness and discomforting nature of its subject matter, "Luka" became a hit single in many countries, including the United States, where it received Grammy nominations for record of the year and song of the year; Vega herself was nominated in the category of the best female vocalist. "Luka" also earned single-of-the-year and song-of- the-year honors at the 1987 New York Music Awards (at which Vega was also named artist of the year and best folk artist and Solitude Standing named best pop album). In New York Newsday [October 18, 1987], Wayne Robins credited the song's popularity to its universality. Indeed, the black-and-white "Luka" video, shows not a child but a woman, portrayed by Vega, as the victim of abuse.
Vega collaborated with Anton Sanko to produce her third album, Days of Open Hand (1990). During its production she tried to learn more about "the way songs work." she revealed to Wayne Robins in New York Newsday [April 17, 1990]. "And I found my voice would go as far as I could push it. I found all new ranges, low parts, and high parts, I even sang with some vibrato. It's a strange thing to feel the music in my body as opposed to just in my mind. She has also been quoted as saying that she intended the songs on the album to "give a sense of resolving the past and looking to the future."
While critical reaction to Days of Open Hand ranged from glowing to dismissive, the reception accorded 99.9 F (1992), Vega's most recent album, was overwhelmingly favorable. Working for the first time with Mitchell Froom, who produced 99.9 F, Vega entered a new musical domain, "hopscotch[ing] from industrial rock to girl-group pop to dreamy psychedelia," as Stephanie Zacharek reported in the Boston Phoenix [September 11, 1992]. In a conversation with Laura Lee Davies for the British magazine Time Out [August 12-19, 1992], Vega explained her willingness to try what she termed "jumping off musical cliffs". "I guess a lot of things in my life had changed", she said. "Some long-term relationships had broken up in the last year, and I was working without my usual band. That added to the feeling of recklessness". She has also attributed her openness to musical experimentation in "relax[ing] ... and allow[ing] more of [her] personality to come out."
Vega clearly illustrated the complexity of her personality in 99.9 F. In his Jam Entertainment News Review, Craig Michaels wrote that the twelve cuts on the album - which include such highly praised songs as "Rock in this Pocket (Song of David)", "Blood Makes Noise", "In Liverpool", "Fat Man and Dancing Girl", "(If you were) In My Movie", "As Girls Go", "Blood Sings" and the title song "run the gamut from introspection to tribute to nightmarish absurdity", and Vega, he added, "is successful in each of these poetic forays.""What wasn't expected," Michaels continued, "and what contributes heavily to this masterpiece, is the production lent the tunes by Mitchell Froom.
Not only did he obviously understand the emotions Vega wishes to convey, he took each subtle nuance and expounded upon it, making this a collection of twelve brilliant little aural paintings. Much like [the Beatles'] Sgt. Pepper['s Lonely Hearts Club Band] this album is a tribute to the intensely personal commitment and understanding an artist and producer have to share to get things just right. With 99.9 F, Suzanne Vega has delivered what most musicians can only dream about - a slice of perfection". 99.9 F won a New York Music Award as the best rock album of 1992.
"I'm reserved," Suzanne Vega once said. "But I'm not timid." "Her wispy visage and lean graceful frame often leave the impression of a fragile being," Marcia B. Merson wrote in BSide [April/May 1993]. "Yet, Suzanne is nothing near fragile in body, mind or spirit." Gary Graff of the New York Daily News [July 19, 1987] described Vega as "tough-minded, outspoken, humorous, and direct." "She is surprisingly articulate." according to Anthony Scaduto. "Interviewing many pop music personalities is like driving through fog, but Vega is direct, unambiguous, candid." Vega, who lives in a loft in lower Manhattan, was romantically involved with the folk singer Frank Christian and, some years later, with Anton Sanko; her current companion is Mitchell Froom. SOURCE: August 1994 Current Biography
