Detailed Biography by Bruce Miyashita

[Beauty & Crime][Brief Biography] [Detailed Biography 1 2]

days of open Hand

days of open Hand was released in April of 1990. In its lead review of the album, Rolling Stone wrote: With each new album, Suzanne Vega gets stronger. days of open Hand is her hardest and loveliest music yet; it is distinguished by a prayerful intensity and a clean, sharp intelligence that announce a young artist fully come into her own.

Suzanne Vega, the singer-songwriter's 1985 debut, was all watercolor suggestiveness. Its pastel tunes sketched out keener melodies to come, and its lyrics – about a sense of looming psychic threat, the thawing of winter, the possibility of hope – grabbed almost randomly at meaning. Solitude Standing, two years later, was more focused, her words achieving mystic force ("Her palm is split with a flower with a flame"), her music gaining punch from a band whose four members proved fit, resourceful collaborators. The haunting "Luka," with its unflinching look at violence against children and its tough black-and-white video, not only clarified Vega's vision but distanced her from the softer side of the folk resurgence she'd helped spark.

With Days of Open Hand, Vega assumes her place in the folk tradition as an individual talent. Bob Dylan did it when he moved from the offhand plain speaking of folk songs into a denser folk rock, his lyrics courting a wild obscurity in his driven search of a more personal voice. Vega's record takes a similar leap; she's now beyond borders, making an unaffected art music that's heady, heartfelt, very demanding – and very rewarding.

…Vega's voice has never been so moving; particularly when accompanied by her own multitracked singing or backed by Shawn Colvin, she sounds like an earthangel choir.

This incantatory spirit makes for music that, while not overtly religious, surely urges toward transcendence. Vega is a Buddhist, and it may be the strict beauty of that most riddling of faiths that lends her poetry its clear but complex grace. Certainly she understands life, in general, as a sacramental means. When, in "Predictions," she sings, "Let's tell the future ... By salt. By dice/By meal. By mice/By dough of cakes/By sacrificial fire," her aim isn't merely theatrical, a moody evocation of Macbeth: She is also disclosing a sense of the world as wonder, as revelation.

The lead song on the album is “Tired of Sleeping.” Like the rest of the album, the song exists in the disturbing, uneasy margin between dreams and rationality.

That's kind of a strange song. I started writing it about eight years ago. It was something I found in one of my notebooks. "Oh Mom, the dreams are not so bad..." And I couldn't figure out what the rest of it should be, so I just left it there. And eight years later I had this thing of "there's so much to do and I'm tired of sleeping." And suddenly all of the dream images came out. It all gelled, all of a sudden. It's kind of to my mom, but not really. If she asked what it was about, I couldn't tell her. The image in my mind is that of a child is sleeping. She's having a bad dream. She's probably said something in her sleep, or shouted, and the mother comes. The child wakes up and says, "I'm fine, you can go back to bed." The child is comforting the mother. I'm tired of sleeping anyway, I was thinking of getting up, don't worry, go back to bed. But then, of course, the dream images that the child is having are terrifying. The bird on the string. But there's this constant need to comfort the mother. It's weird. It relates to my life. All the characters in the song relate to my life in some way. I think the kids of the church steps are my brothers and sisters. But that gets terribly Psych 103. But it almost doesn't matter. What matters more is the feeling of the song. The images have their own context. If you sing that song in Czechoslovakia, where they just had a revolution, it has a whole different resonance than if you sing it in San Francisco, or in a college town. The college kids will feel it's a psychedelic song and people in Czechoslovakia feel that you're talking about rising out of sleep and releasing yourself from oppression. Both readings are true…For a long time when I sang that song, I would feel like crying. It took about a year to be able to sing it and not want to cry…I think the line in the dream was "the children are begging for God." And there's a double meaning to that. One is that they're begging for money for God. Like alms for the church. And I'm not Catholic or Christian. I don't go to church. So I don't understand why I would have that dream. But on the other hand "the children are begging for God" is asking for salvation. It seemed to me that it was me and my brothers and sisters playing on the steps of this church. My stepfather's father was a minister, and that might have something to do with it. It's all very dense, personal stuff. (Song Talk, Vol. 2, #17, Spring 1992)

Suzanne co-produced days of open Hand with Anton Sanko, the keyboardist in her band. It was seen as an innovating and daring recording, in that it did not attempt to re-create the sound of her first two albums, which would have been the safer route. Still, at the time, Suzanne was critical of the end product:

I think it’s too pristine and there's not enough tension in it. There's lots of tension in the lyrics but the music, I think, came out too slow and too quiet sounding. And it took too long to record, it took us a year to record it. Also we didn't have the experience. We didn't know how to produce and sometimes when you don't have the experience you overcompensate for your lack of it. I found it frustrating. I did not like producing my own album. I felt that it was too tiring and that I had no perspective. We were working on it all day long and all night long for a year and I started to lose any sense of fun or spontaneity. (Fatima Castro Silva’s interview with Suzanne Vega originally published in Urgent Whispers.)

Interestingly, where Suzanne may have seen a “pristine” album, others saw a recording of unusual beauty and even sadness.

A couple of things had happened. One was the big success of "Luka" and I saw that it had an impact in the world. And the other was that I met my father, in 1988. And these were things that I had hoped for but did not really believe could really happen. I felt very depleted in some ways because I had been all over the world and everyone had taken these questions out of me and I felt very empty. I needed to fill myself up again. And that's what I spent my time doing, sleeping and trying to recover my health and in sleeping I had all these dreams and I started to think about the future and what direction I was going to move in. So the album is filled with references to dreams and to the future, because that was my process of filling myself up, after I had been emptied out by the world. (Urgent Whispers.)

Captured in the song “Pilgrimage,” and informing the songs of both “days of open Hand” and her next album, “99.9F,” Suzanne’s search for and encounter with her natural father was, as it would be for anyone, an event of special importance.

One day when I was about nine my father and I were in the living room alone, sitting down, facing each other. He looked at me intensely and said: "Have you ever wondered why you don't look like me?" I hadn't, at least not consciously, although we look as different as two people can. He is dark-skinned and heavy set, with black, curly hair, while I was thin and pale with straight, blonde hair.

I knew the correct answer would be "Yes", so that's what I said. He continued: "Well, you have another father." I thought maybe he was joking or that this was a test to see if I would believe him and show some emotion. I was a quiet child, who didn't say much and kept my feelings very much to myself.

I was so shocked that I simply sat and stared at him. I must have asked "Who is he?" thinking it would be someone I knew. The only person I could think of was Marvin, from next door.

It was all terribly confusing. My stepfather is Puerto Rican and I'd been brought up to believe I was half-Puerto Rican. I had been to Puerto Rico, spoke Spanish, and felt close to my grandmother and aunt on that side, and they had accepted me as their own.

Now I was being told that [my father] was what was called "white" in my neighbourhood - a mixture of English-Scottish-Irish. What's more, I'd been born in California, which was a shock, because I'd grown up in Spanish Harlem in New York and assumed that that was where I'd been born.

Surprisingly, it didn't affect my relationship with my stepfather at all. I still idolised him and wanted him to love and accept me for what I was. At first, I was not remotely interested in meeting this new father - it made me uncomfortable and ashamed about being different from my two brothers and my sister. It was not something I was happy about. When my mother asked me two years later if I'd like to meet my father, I told her no. I didn't want anything to do with him.

When I was 18, however, and we were moving house, my mother gave me two photographs from her first wedding - she'd been married to my father very briefly when they were both under 20, and it hadn't lasted.

I spent much of my childhood wishing I was a different person but, over the years, with a bit of success as a songwriter, I felt much more confident. It was not until I was 28 and had had some acclaim that I was prepared to find out who my real father was. I tried looking him up in the phone book but he has a common name - Vega is my stepfather's name -and there were at least five people with his name in every town.

Eventually, I hired a detective, who traced him within two weeks. When I found out, I was in the middle of a world tour. I can remember feeling very calm about it. I carried his address and phone number around for months but, being so busy, decided not to contact him then.

Six months later, I sent my father a Christmas card and, on New Year's Eve, he called. It was a very odd feeling to hear his voice. I realised that he didn't know my name or that I was a singer and when I told him I was Suzanne Vega, he couldn't believe it.

"You mean Luka - that's you?" He had heard the song many times on the radio but never dreamt I was his daughter. In his fantasy, I was a housewife in Florida with two kids - the opposite of what I am. He immediately went out and bought the record and looked at the cover to discover how I'd grown up.

He wrote back, sending lots of photographs. He was totally different from what I expected. Having looked at my mother and subtracted myself, I imagined somebody like James Joyce: thin, pale with spectacles, who was literary and nervous. In fact, he's really big - over 6ft - with red cheeks and not thin at all. I certainly wouldn't have picked him out in a crowd as my father. In my mind I'd imagined some sort of secret signal passing between us but we could have met in the street and never known.

I told my mother that I'd found him but she wasn't happy. It was probably a part of her life she'd tried to put behind her and was annoyed that I kept trying to dig it up. My stepfather, who I thought would be angry, wasn't. He had almost expected it. My half-brothers and sisters were wary but not certain how to deal with this whole thing.

In 1988, two days after the Grammies, where I'd received three nominations and sung at the show, I flew out to California to finally meet my father. I had this fear, the whole time, that the plane would crash before landing. Then it would be my fault we never met.

I walked down the ramp at Los Angeles Airport and he saw me first. I looked right and left, and then there was this moment of complete recognition. We hugged but I couldn't stop shaking. Your brain picks up the oddest details to focus on and won't let go of them. He was wearing a white suit with two-tone saddle shoes - brown and white. I was thinking, "Oh, my goodness." Not that he didn't look good but, growing up in southern California, his dress sense was so very different from New York, where I grew up.

What I remember clearest, however, was looking at his eyes and his hands. I had figured from the way my mother had behaved that I got my hands from him. She would come over and say: "I wish mine were like yours." And I was right about his hands - it's not just their shape but the way they move; there's a kind of animation, which is exactly the same.

My father's voice and his way of speaking sounded very familiar and I realised I must have had some babyhood memory of him talking to me. He'd kept snapshots of me. It was very strange, seeing the childhood photographs I'd grown up with suddenly expanded. My mother had cut him out of all our photographs except for the two I was given at 28 but it had never really occurred to me before what she'd done. Yes, the photographs were unusual shapes but I just thought she was being creative.

My grandfather had left my grandmother and she was overburdened with children. She'd put my father up for adoption and his three brothers and sisters into an institution. I was the only relative he'd had since, and I'd gone - taken away by my mother to live in New York. When I was born, he was really still a kid himself but he hired a lawyer to try for paternity and had gone to great lengths to keep me. I asked why he hadn't tried to contact me; he said he hadn't wanted to know about his parents until he was in his 30s and expected me to feel the same. (From the U.K. Express January 6, 2000.)

Also in 1990 came a new version of the song “Tom’s Diner.” This incarnation, created by blending Vega's original acapella vocal with a dance-club groove, moved into Billboard's Top 5 on December 22, 1990. It stayed in the Top 10 for 5 weeks and the Top 100 for 15 weeks during the winter of '90-'91. The song began as a track from her second album, "Solitude Standing." It underwent its transformation when some dance club DJs under the name DNA created a bootleg by grafting the song onto a funky rhythm. The song caused a sensation in clubs and was one of the earliest, best, and most famous examples of the sampling that is so common today in hip-hop. Vega heard it, approved the distribution of the song, and it became a huge hit. But the story doesn't end there. The song--both this version and Vega's original--became and remains today, an almost universal melody, popping up hear, there, and everywhere in the cultural landscape—in French lingerie commercials, Japanese coffee jingles, fashion show soundtracks, exercises in English-as-a-second language classes, and as an entire album, produced by Vega ("Tom's Album", 1991) of versions of the song by fans and performers such as REM about everything from accidental pregnancy to T.V. pop culture.

99.9F

In September of 1992, Suzanne released 99.9F. “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."

In its review, Rolling Stone would write:

Seven years and, now, three potent albums after her debut, Suzanne Vega is in a kind of sovereign position; her influence can be detected in many a female singer-songwriter. Meanwhile, she forges ahead, gaining a slow, steady momentum, expanding on her elliptical song craft, stirring in new textures and tactics…Her cool, understated voice is as subtle as her imagery, which refuses to meet subjects head-on, preferring the power of suggestion and paradox. Vega has been stretching beyond her folk roots. Her acoustic guitar remains the mainstay of her sound, but the overall approach is spicier – its funky painterliness is reminiscent of Sam Phillips's Cruel Inventions.

Producer Mitchell Froom works up an artful clangor. He and Vega invoke striking postpop inventiveness on "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" and "(If You Were) In My Movie" and go Celtic by way of Jupiter on "As a Child." The degree of infectiousness on the album is, for Vega, unprecedented, but dour realizations about the songs often sink in after her hooks have hooked you. The specter of AIDS rises grimly through the picturesque "Blood Makes Noise," told from the perspective of a recently diagnosed victim too dizzy to think straight. In shadowy waltz time, "Bad Wisdom" too unfolds its story about a victim torn from innocence and a mother's love. It's not clear whether the title tune refers to passion or infection…

Vega's tunes, as usual, prove to be at once stinging and soothing. Sonically venturesome and marked by tare poetic depth, 99.9 Fº is yet another deeply rewarding chapter in Vega's artistic saga.

99.9 F featured a number of masterpieces. In “Blood Makes Noise” Vega's desire to continue to evolve as a writer and performer, to avoid the trap of repeating herself, is manifested in a song that refutes the “folkie” stereotype. Relying on percussion and synthesizer, the song combines different instrumentation and a dense, layered production, with a long-standing theme: viewing the world from the perspective of person who may or not be entirely together.

In “99.9F”, the same concise lyricism Vega brings to every song is present, but it's allied to a production that brings out the dreamlike, almost hallucinogenic elements present in many of her songs.

With “In Liverpool” Vega created one of the best pop songs ever committed to tape. It begins with the insistent piano chord that carries throughout, a sampled sound that resembles the crank and clash of a Victorian steam work, Vega's acoustic guitar, and finally an organ to create gloriously rich sonic envelop. Vega paints a series of intense word-images--the pale light, a boy in the belfry, a hunchback in heaven--and marries them to one of her best melodies, a strong vocal delivery, and a simple electric guitar line to produce a soaring masterpiece. The song's final, repeating guitar riff, takes on an epic grandeur and majesty that is quite remarkable given the song's quiet and meditative opening stanzas.

In some ways a sequel to "Pilgrimage," "Blood Sings" tells the story of a person who meets a blood relative and how "When blood sees blood/Of its own/It sings to see itself again." Suzanne's vocal--gentle and perfectly understated--is accompanied by her own acoustic guitar and the tastefully simple embellishments of her band. The lyric is evocative and sensuous in sound ("One body spilt and passed along the line/From the shoulder to the hip"). It also echoes back to images in other songs; the "child who had been left alone at birth/Left to fend and taught to fight" connects with Luka, with Casper Hauser, with the narrator of "Bad Wisdom" (from 99.9), and with that part of the listener that is still the vulnerable child. In one magnificent line Suzanne captures the essence of a childhood lost: "See his eyes and how they start with light/Getting colder as the pictures go." Seldom has so much been said with so few words.

99.9 F won a New York Music Award as the best rock album of 1992.

Nine Objects of Desire

In the four-year gap between 99.9F and Nine Objects of Desire, which was released in September of 1996, Suzanne married Mitchell Froom and gave birth to their daughter, Ruby, on July 8, 1994. She contributed a song to the soundtrack (released January 1995) to the film Dead Man Walking, titled “Woman on a Tier” and in October of 1995 Suzanne’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Issac” appeared on an album, Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen.

Dead Man Walking was based on the experiences of Sister Helen Prejean. In an interview with Alan Moroney of KPFT Houston, she spoke of her response to Suzanne’s song.

[AM] I specifically wanted to ask you about the Suzanne Vega song because that is THE song on the album that is specifically about you.

[HP] You know, the first time I heard it I did not like it. It seemed so harsh.

[AM] It's the industrial sound.

[HP] That's it, clangs and all that. But as I listened to it some more I went, 'my God, she's got it, she's got that experience'.

[AM] I've been to a death row, and prisons are not quiet.

[HP] There are no soft sounds in prison, nothing is soft. People, politicians and talk show hosts call them these plush places. They are not. No soft experiences either.

[AM] It is the song with the fewest words, yet it seems to be pretty evocative.

[HP] 'I'll see you thru' God she really got this. 'You're new to me, I'm new to you. I'll see you thru' and 'they've come to get your man'. It was so strange to me, the first time I went. It was terrifying to go into that place of death, you know, mechanised, premeditated death.

The 13 interpretations on the 1995 tribute recording, Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen (A&M 31454 0259 2), say as much about the sensibilities of the artists as they do about Leonard Cohen's songs. Vega's performance seems like it belongs to a different album altogther. It gets inside Cohen's words and elevates the entire album from the safe predictability of Top 40. The choice of the song itself is revealing. Cohen's lyric is drawn from the Book of Genesis, Chapter 22, and tells the story of how God tested Abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice his only son, Issac. The chilling final verse of the song foreshadows the conflict between Issac's sons, Jacob and Essau, in Genesis 27 (The Lord said to Issac's wife, Rebecca: "Two nations are within you; You will give birth to two rival peoples" Genesis 25:23).

It is by far the song on the album least known by the public--but it is the song that stays with you longest after the record is finished. Backed by Vega's spare, acoustic guitar and Ron Sexsmith's ghostly electric guitar, the song captures Vega's gift for combining the traditional and the progressive, passion with restraint. When she sings "when I lay upon the mountain/and my father's hand was trembling/with the beauty of the word," the religious and mythic potential of Cohen's work is realized. The whole effect--her voice and guitar, Jerry Marotta's percusion, and Sexsmith's electric guitar--is a suspenseful, dramatic, and haunting, passion-play.

Of Nine Objects of Desire, Rolling Stone wrote:

Vega is now a wife (she is married to producer Mitchell Froom) and a mother (they have a daughter, Ruby), and Nine Objects of Desire reflects great changes in her lyrical and musical perspective. She addresses the anticipation of birth and death, respectively, in "Birth-day (Love Made Real)" and "Thin Man." There are the remembrances of past mistakes in "Headshots" and, in "Caramel," the fear of new ones. And Vega does all this with an impressive clarity (there's hardly an oblique word or thought here) and economy (no wasted ones, either) that recall her earliest work and are wonderfully displayed in the pointed reflection of "World Before Columbus" ("If your love were taken from me/Every color would be black and white/It would be as flat as the world before Columbus/That's the day that I lose half my sight").

Yet the music is surprisingly spare and buoyant. Against Froom's evocative production and keyboard backdrops, Vega confidently makes her way through the Eurocafe balladry of "My Favorite Plum," an Astrud Gilbertostyle samba; "Caramel"; the arty folk of "Honeymoon Suite"; and even a hint of techno rock in "Casual Match."

Nine Objects of Desire continued to illustrate the enormous stylistic range of Suzanne’s song writing; there are countless musical treasurers on the recording. In “Birth-day (love made real),” the opening track of the album, Suzanne tackles the act of child birth (perhaps the only song lyric by any writer to do so) and with her lyric ("shake all over like an old sick dog"), distorted vocal, and full-bodied bass and drum backing (a hallmark of the album), meets the challenge. Mitchell Froom and Chad Blake's production style was well suited to reproducing the pain of creation, both literally and figuratively. In Nine Objects of Desire, the inventive instrumentation and sound sampling of 99.9F were harnessed to Suzanne's most melodically rhythmic music to create an album that was in many ways a synthesis of Vega's musical love's: wordplay, eclectic instrument and sound combinations, the acoustic guitar, simple melodic lines, and hard-driving rhythms and riffs.

A song of flirtation and spontaneous, fleeting attraction, “Stockings” continued the theme of fantasy and desire heard in several songs stretching as far back as her first album (“Some Journey”) and continuing throughout her song writing career (e.g. “If You Were in My Movie,” “Casual Match”). Like several other songs on this album, “Stockings” featured a strong vocal and bass melody, a reminder that in addition to beautifully crafted lyrics, Suzanne was becoming an increasingly adroit creator of melodic lines.

With “Caramel,” a song from the soundtrack to the film "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," Suzanne exercised her love of Brazillian bossa nova, particularly the recordings of vocalist Astrud Gilberto and the songs of Antonio Carlos Jobim. While the melody and arrangement paid tribute to Gilberto's style, the lyric was pure Vega--rather than just express desire, she set up a tug-of-war between passion and restraint, adding a layer of thematic and lyrical sophistication, and her distinctive viewpoint on the ambiguity of most things in life, to the topic. It also showcased Vega's peerless ability to imbue an elegantly compact phrase with wit, double entendres, rhythm, and rhyme ("So goodbye/sweet appetite/no single bite/could satisfy...")

On “World Before Columbus,” Suzanne took the premise of how the world would look if you literally had one eye or saw in black and white and extended this into a metaphor for the loss of a loved one. A rich vocal and some lovely Beatlesque piano lines were applied to some of Vega's most beautiful lines ("And they'll never know the gold/Or the copper in your hair") to create on of her few, overt, love songs.

"Headshots" extended Suzanne stripped-down and unadorned instrumentation style into interesting new territory. She had always tended towards very austere arrangements, such as in "Cracking" and "Tom's Diner." "Headshots" ultra simple instrumentation--the bass and snare drum carry almost all of the rhythm and melody--helped it to stand out from the more melodic, lusher arrangements on Nine Objects. "Headshots" combined the introspective lyric and perspective of a song like "Cracking" with an almost hip-hop beat, like a long-lost cousin to DNA's version of "Tom's Diner." The "middle 8 bars" of the song--"on a day/ as cold and grey/as today"--is a very simple section and lasts for all of a few seconds, but is one of loveliest moments in any of her songs. In those few bars, the instrumentation and mixing of the song creates the illusion of the narrator stopping for a moment, looking into the sky, and reflecting for a moment, before plunging back into the narrow confines of her thoughts.

Over the next two years, Suzanne toured in support of her new album, working her schedule around the raising of her daughter. Said Suzanne: “I'm determined not to follow in my grandmother's footsteps…I take Ruby on tour with me and will sacrifice the parts of my career I need to in order to be a good mother to her.” In June of 1997 she appeared on the acclaimed PBS series Sessions at West 54th and in July appeared at the first concerts of the Lilith Fair tour. In May of 1998, her song “Dopamine” (co-written with Mitchell Froom) appeared on Froom’s album, Dopamine.

Tried and True

In the Fall of 1998, A&M released an album of 17 of Suzanne’s songs – 15 of them representing her most famous work and two new songs, “Book & a Cover” and “Rosemary.” The recording was not available in the U.S. except as an import. “Book & a Cover” is a relatively minor song in Suzanne’s repertoire; “Rosemary,” on the other hand, was an instant masterpiece. Deceptively simple, the song seemed to carry the weight of every sad regret on its slight shoulders.

Throughout almost all of her songs is the motif of ideal love, the idealized memory of a person. Sometimes it comes out in the form of a romantic fantasy like "Some Journey," other times in a song like "Rosemary," "In Liverpool," "Tom's Diner," "Gypsy," or "Calypso." The ideal is either a fiction of the imagination, or it is the memory of an event. In both cases, the memory is uncorrupted by the passage of time or the realities of day-to-day life.

Can you count on people? Will relationships last? Will love stay, or will it be fickle and flit about? What is immutable and unchanging? In the context of Suzanne’s failing marriage, “Rosemary” seemed to take on a greater poignancy. In many of her songs, Suzanne's protagonists do not hold that the reality of day-to-day life is solid. Memories and dreams are often the constant companion throughout life -- a dream from long ago whose images stay with you for years, more like a treasured possession than a fleeting memory.

One can hear much of the pull of solitude in everything from "Solitude Standing" to "By Myself" to "Cracking." Remembrance is nothing if not a solitary act. This is something that one can feel in a song like "In Liverpool," "Blood Sings," or "Rosemary," the solitary act of remembering.

The Passionate Eye

The theme of memories seemed to carry over, however unplanned, into Suzanne’s next major project, a book of her poems, lyrics, short stories, essays, and excerpts from her prized journals. Published in February of 1999 by Spike, an imprint of Avon Books, The Passionate Eye provided one of the most revealing glimpses into Suzanne’s life-of-the-mind.

In part this was accomplished by Vega's decision to organize the material around themes that had personal meaning to her, rather than chronologically, which is the usual format. The cumulative effect of reading Vega's book, was that one walked away with an astonishingly intimate understanding of the writer's passions, obsessions, and preferences. This is not to say that Vega's book was confessional in any traditional sense. Rather, by reading between the lines, thinking about the ideas, images, and metaphors she presented, and through the subtle use of the themes, one did emerge from the book with about as much of an understanding of another person as one could possibly get without having everything spelt-out.

What were some of these themes? Solitude is certainly one, starting with "By Myself," the poem she wrote at age nine, and which then permeates much of her work thereafter. There is the fascinating cousin to the solitude theme, namely her benign self-absorption, her elusiveness, that mesmerizing introversion that makes her such an enigmatic stage presence. This comes through in several pieces, such as the short story "The Pianist," a thinly veiled autobiographic piece that portrays a teenager struggling to find some way to make her mark, to excel, and who also struggles between the need for solitude and the desire to be the focus of attention.

A number of pieces revealed a lusty, down-to-earth personality that gave lie to Vega's public personae as an arctic, folkie waif. This ranged from poems and essays on the techniques and spoils of fist-fighting, to flirtatious, sensual pieces such as "Stockings," "Modesty," "To CL," and "Rough You Up." Passion itself was a thread, from the drunken passion of the poem "Drunken Tune," to the poems "St. Valentine's Day," and "Tulips," which, when juxtaposed, have the same disturbing power as Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems such as "Medusa" or "Cut." Elsewhere are themes around adventure, dreams, remembrance, the urban landscape, duty, blood ties, physical appearance, death, freedom, wonderment, and secrets.

Most powerful, though, were the pieces that revealed a dark, silent rage at violation and powerlessness. This sequence of poems and lyrics, including "Not Me," "Bad Wisdom," and the harrowing "Song of the Black Dress," are stark and horrific; they are howls of outrage. The book, however, ended on an uplifting, almost spiritual tone. Beginning with the short poem, "Angel," on through "Book of Dreams" and "Wooden Horse," as well as the short story "The Pianist," this segment captures the epiphany that was Vega's decision to pursue songwriting. You can feel the rapture of freedom, joy, and fulfillment in Vega, as though released from a cage.

In an interview for Inside Borders, Suzanne described the genesis of the book project:

I started working on it five years ago. First we had to find a publisher, and then it was a question of figuring out what sort of form the book was going to take. The publisher wanted to see new material, and for a while I thought it was going to be just a lot of essays, but once I came in with the little journal pieces, they seemed really happy with that. I have 43 notebooks that I've been picking the material from, so there was a lot of stuff to go through. As it turns out, it's a good time for the book to come out, because I have a feeling right now of looking back at things.

I just had a greatest hits album that came out all over the world, except here. I also left my manager and recently separated from my husband. It's a time to take stock of all the work I've done up to this point, and sort of turn a new page.

Songs in Red and Gray

Throughout 1999, 2000, and 2001, Suzanne continued to tour across North America and Europe. Among the more interesting non-musical projects during this time was her work on the jury for the 2001 Orange Prize, which is the U.K.’s biggest annual fiction writing award for women.

Throughout this time Suzanne also appeared as a guest on several episodes of “The Infinite Mind,” a fascinating public radio series on the many aspects of human psychology. Some of the episodes (which can be heard at the theinfinitemind.com) she appeared on include “Domestic Violence” (March 2003), “Shyness” (December 2001), “Play” (October 2000), “Autism” (July 1999), “Creativity” (March 1999), and “Suicide” (March 1998).

In September 2001, Suzanne released Songs in Red and Gray. In the wake of an almost complete re-ordering of her life including divorce and changes in her management, Suzanne’s sixth album of new material was a complete triumph on every level. Like every album that preceded it, Songs in Red and Gray presented an embarrassment of riches to listeners and a staggering breadth of musical styles. “Widow’s Walk” was a fine a piece of pop writing as Suzanne had ever written, featuring a driving, propulsive guitar riff and strong melody. “(I’ll Never Be) Your Maggie May,” a dead-ringer for the best of the “Nashville-sound” recordings of the ‘70’s, featured a beautiful, flowing melody, playful lyric, and gorgeous production. With “It Makes Me Wonder” and “Machine Ballerina” Suzanne gave Paul McCartney a run for his money with a pair of beautifully produced, catchy, and witty songs. A quartet of songs – “Penitent,” “Soap and Water,” “Songs in Red and Gray,” “Harbor Song” – provided the cathartic, emotional base to the album. And lilting waltz accompanied “Priscilla,” a gentle valentine to one of Suzanne’s vivid, childhood memories.

But it is on the final song, “St. Clare,” that Suzanne’s art attains a grace that is crushingly beautiful. Written by Jack Hardy, Suzanne’s vocal gives lie to idea that she is an indifferent vocalist – she sings like an angel. The song is a revelation, a gesture of absolution, forgiveness, and hope. There may be moments in pop as pure as the way Suzanne sings out the opening words “call on that saint.”

Gorgeous too are the opening acoustic notes that are like the first rays of the sun and the slightly distorted and quavering sound of the mandolin, the way the mandolin and vocals accent each other in a phrase like “barefoot and cold,” and the swirling strings and woodwinds that close out the song. The final words are both full of hope and sadness: in the shadow that surrounds the song, in the ominous percussion beneath the final lines, in the way the song suddenly ends.

Vigil

In the aftermath of the September 11th attack on New York City, members of the Greenwich Village Songwriter’s Exchange produced an album of songs. In March of 2002, Vigil was released, its proceeds going to a fund for the family of one of the victims of that attack.

Bruce Miyashita
Toronto, June 2003