Suzanne Vega to Play Livestream Benefit for Struggling Clubs

Suzanne Vega has announced a pair of livestreamed shows at New York's 

Blue Note Jazz Club to help struggling venues.

Greg Holz*

Suzanne Vega to Play Livestream Benefit for Struggling Clubs

“I heard through the grapevine that all kinds of places are teetering and may not make it through,” Vega says

David Browne
October 5, 2020

Like nearly every working musician on the planet, Suzanne Vega knows firsthand the impact of the Covid-19 shutdown: An entire summer European tour — along with U.S. shows in October and November — were postponed until next year after live music abruptly stopped.

Suzanne Vega Celebrates New York City With a Cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’

Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega Celebrates New York City With a Cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’

“Lou Reed was the first artist I saw live in concert,” singer-songwriter says, “and encountering his music changed my way of writing songs”

Angie Martoccio
August 27, 2020

Suzanne Vega has shared a cover of her late, long-time friend Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The rendition appears on her upcoming LP An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, out September 11th via Amanuensis/Cooking Vinyl.

Suzanne Vega's teenage obsessions / 'Taxi Driver captured something awful but made it beautiful'

 

Suzanne Vega … ‘I’ve started dancing at my shows, but yet to go full disco.’ Composite: George Holz

TEENAGE KICKS

Suzanne Vega's teenage obsessions: 'Taxi Driver captured something awful but made it beautiful'

In the first of a weekly series where film and music stars discuss their youthful fixations, the US singer recalls silly walks and Saturday Night Fever dance classes

Interview by Dave Simpson
Thu 3 Sep 2020 16.30 BST

Songs of Leonard Cohen

After 1967, when this came out, if a stranger asked: “What’s your name, little girl?” and I said: “Suzanne,” they’d go: “Oh, like the song?” And I’d stare at them thinking: “What song?” Then I heard this beautiful version of Cohen’s song Suzanne by Judy Collins. I was so relieved that the song was beautiful and … weird! In 1974, when I was 14, I saw the album in the record store, took the risk and fell in love with it. All the songs were so beautiful, interesting and intimate, and he used a nylon string acoustic guitar which I’d just started playing. I didn’t realise how funny Leonard was until I got to know him. In 1988, I went to see him at Carnegie Hall and met his sister, a big woman in a brightly coloured dress. When she said: “He’s been dying to meet you,” my inner teenager was thrilled. The next time we met was for a very well-known photoshoot when he had my head in his hands, mashed up against his chest, which was … [laughs] very exciting. That was the photographer’s idea, but Leonard didn’t complain, let’s put it that way. I still listen to the album, and consider it a good friend.

Suzanne Vega on Gender Identity, Britney Spears and New Concept Album

 

Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega on Gender Identity,

Britney Spears and New Concept

Album

Singer-songwriter’s latest, ‘Lover, Beloved,’ is inspired by life and work of Southern author Carson McCullers

By 

JERRY PORTWOOD 

October 12, 2016

When Suzanne Vega premiered the play, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, five years ago in New York City, the evening of theatrical cabaret was the culmination of decades of investigation into the Southern author. But it didn’t satiate her creative spark. This week the “Luka” singer releases Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, a 10-song concept album that takes listeners on a journey through literary luminary’s life and work.

Suzanne Vega on Her Return, Lou Reed’s Puppy and Loving Macklemore

Suzanne Vega
George Holz

Suzanne Vega on Her Return,

Lou Reed’s Puppy and Loving

Macklemore

The singer-songwriter talks about the inspiration of her first new album in seven years

DAVID BROWNE
January 16, 2014

Suzanne Vega never knows who’ll turn out to be a devotee. Take the young Adele fan who approached her at a recent show after Adele cited Vega as an influence (and “The Queen and the Soldier” as one of her favorite songs). Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange and writer of hits for Sky Ferreira and Solange Knowles, recently called Vega “a big influence.” And when Vega and Danger Mouse worked on Dark Night of the Soul several years back, the producer admitted to his own fandom. “I thought, ‘He’ll just know “Tom’s Diner,”‘ but it turned out he was a really big fan of [the 2001 album] Songs in Red and Gray,” she says. “He knew all the deep tracks. So you never know. Music is not as segregated as people make it out to be.”

Suzanne Vega: how we made Tom's Diner

‘It’s a real place and I’m mentioned in their menu now. But they call me Susan Vega – and I still have to pay for coffee’

Interviews by Dave Simpson
Tuesday 18 October 2016 07.00 BST

Suzanne Vega, singer-songwriter

When I was at college in Manhattan in the early 1980s, I used to go to Tom’s Restaurant on 112th and Broadway for coffee. I liked its ordinariness: it was the kind of place you’d find on any corner. One day, I was in there mulling over a conversation I’d had with a photographer friend, Brian Rose, about romantic alienation. He told me he saw his life as if through a pane of glass. I came out of Tom’s with the idea of writing a song about an alienated character who just sees things happening around him. I was walking down Broadway and the melody popped into my head.

The line about the actor “who had died while he was drinking” was true: William Holden’s obituary had been in that morning’s paper. The “bells of the cathedral” were those of St John the Divine up the street, though I made up the bit about the woman “fixing her stockings” and changed “restaurant” to “diner” to make it rhyme.

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I imagined the song as some kind of French film background music, played on a piano, but I don’t play piano so I recorded it a capella for my Solitude Standing album and didn’t think much more about it. Three years later, I heard that two young English guys called DNA had put a beat to it – and I cringed. I’d just had a big hit with Luka, which – unfortunately, despite its dark subject matter, child abuse – lent itself to all sorts of parodies and covers, most of which I hated.

Tom's Diner -Suzanne Vega

I feared more of the same, but to my great relief I loved what DNA had done. I thought it would be played in a few dance clubs and that would be it, but it surpassed everyone’s expectations. I even got a plaque for it being one of the most played R&B songs – funny for a folk singer.

Suzanne Vega: ‘It’s taken me a while to say, You are what you are, it’s fine’

The 80s pop-folk star talks about her confused identity growing up, and her new album drawn from her one-woman play about US writer Carson McCullers


Andrew Anthony
Sunday 9 October 2016 10.00 BST

S

uzanne Vega, the youthful lone voice of folkish revival in the 1980s, is now a 57-year-old woman but she remains, as she always has been, a mysteriously protean presence. She’s elfin small with large blue eyes and a face that tends towards cool inexpressiveness. She tells me that she’s often mistaken in the street for other people. “I’ve been told I’m Cynthia Nixon, Beth Orton, Isabella Rossellini and Molly Ringwald,” she says, shaking her head with bemusement.

Which one, I ask, does she most enjoy being confused with.

“Oh Isabella Rossellini. I was like, holy cow, thanks!”

Small blue thing 

 Suzanne Vega

Vega says she’s fascinated by the idea of “pretending to be other people”, and she’s auditioned unsuccessfully for several high-profile film parts down the years. She was up for the role of the underground musician in Desperately Seeking Susan, but lost out to Madonna. She got rejected as a nun in Sister Act, because her audition was “too dark”, and nearly played opposite Tom Cruise in The Color of Money.

Suzanne Vega / One of the most brilliant songwriters of her generation

Suzanne Vega

One of the most brilliant songwriters 

of her generation

Widely regarded as one of the most brilliant songwriters of her generation, Suzanne Vega emerged as a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s when, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she sang what has 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 vibrato-less voice that has been described as “a cool, dry sandpaper- brushed near-whisper” and as “plaintive but disarmingly powerful.”

Bob Dylan
Photo by Ken Regan
Poster by T.A.

Women on Bob Dylan

As Bob Dylan becomes the first singer-songwriter to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, five female artists salute his genius

BOB DYLAN'S BIOGRAPHY

The Observer

Illustration by Malika Favre
Sunday 16 October 2016 09.15 BST

Suzanne Vega, singer-songwriter: ‘I see goddesses and queens and women revered in his music’

Suzanne Vega by Pal Hansen

I am thrilled for Bob Dylan and I think it’s very appropriate that he’s being praised for the literary excellence of his work. The citation credits him with having created “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” and that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s not being honoured as a musician but for the depth and breadth of his vision and the eloquence of the language with which he expresses it. He has every literary device in his songs: character, narrative, style.

 

Suzanne Vega

AN INTERVIEW WITH SUZANNE VEGA

TUESDAY 9 OCTOBER 2012

SOLITUDE STANDING, SUZANNE VEGA’S DEFINING ALBUM, HAS JUST REACHED A QUARTER CENTURY IN AGE. TO CELEBRATE THIS LANDMARK, THE NEW YORK SONGWRITER IS PERFORMING A ONE-OFF SHOW IN LONDON NEXT WEEK.

There’s a 1992 episode of BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD, in which the jaundiced wastrels view the vivid cut-up video for recent boom-and-klang single BLOOD MAKES NOISE. The pair are non-plussed by the decidedly moderne efforts of  “that LUKA chick”.
Following 1987’s huge crossover hit single LUKA, “that LUKA chick” is probably how Suzanne Vega was most widely known. The early 1990s sound-flip, from graceful sepia to brash technicolour, challenged drivetime radio listeners and MTV viewers who presumed they had her correctly pinned and mounted as an acoustic ingenue.
A spikier, more aggressive, sonic palate and a sometimes more impressionistic approach to lyrics featured on the 99.9F album (1992), while more ambient redefinition had appeared on 1990’s DAYS OF OPEN HAND.
Five years before Beavis & Butthead’s confused fug, as she approached the release of her second album – SOLITUDE STANDING, from which LUKA sprang – the New Yorker was on the verge of consolidating a respectable reputation for crafting distinctive tunes and, more crucially, for setting keen-eyed observation and intimate reflection to them.
Across several years of lugging her guitar and stories around the coffee shops and smoky clubs on Greenwich Village’s bohemian scene, Vega had framed herself as a beat-poet variant of the emerging contemporised folk tradition. Signed by A&M Records in 1984, her debut album was released to general critical acclaim in 1985.
CRACKING, SMALL BLUE THING and minor hit single MARLENE ON THE WALL were amongst several high watermark moments during a discreetly confident set in which cool melodies counterpointed warmly intelligent lyrics. It was Vega’s precise and elegant distribution of words which really piqued curiosities and captured imaginations. Her debut was an engaging signpost: clearly, here was an interesting young woman who knew not just what she wanted to say but was diligent in the craft of how she would say it.
1987’s SOLITUDE STANDING was to become the record that elevated Suzanne Vega to the major league. Not only did it expand on the vocabulary of sounds and refine the techniques of songwriting from that debut, but it opened out her commercial reach through two unexpectedly enormous worldwide hit singles.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of their parent album’s release, Suzanne Vega spoke to The Mouth Magazine about the hits LUKA and TOM’S DINER, the writing and recording of SOLITUDE STANDING, and her thoughts about it now…

I guess when an artist’s first record is released, it’s the one that carries the weight of the paying of dues. You were on the scene in New York for a few years before your debut album, playing small clubs and so on… It must have been an interesting time – no money, trying to win audiences over ..?
Absolutely. It was great… I had a lot of songs and I was writing steadily – a song every few months – and I could try them out at a leisurely pace. I was with friends who had high standards for writing, and so it was good to try to meet them.

So NY was a good grounding… and the songs on that first record are very strong. How did signing to A&M Records come about?
The record deal came after a great review in the New York Times. We’d made a demo tape and my manager had already submitted it to A&M Records twice. However, after this particular review they came running…

When you recorded the debut album, was it difficult to have fixed, definitive, versions of songs that had been fluid for you?
Since I was on tour I sang the songs the usual way, so it wasn’t difficult to let go of them as recordings. I don’t listen to the records very often. Not now, and not then.

The debut was greeted with critical acclaim and some success – did that have a direct bearing on the way you approached SOLITUDE STANDING? I ask in terms of songwriting, in terms of singing… It’s a much more assured album in both of those regards. Were you consciously raising your game?
I was writing songs the usual way, more or less. Where I had more of a hand was in the final mixes. I sat with Shelly Yakus (Chief Engineer and Vice President of A&M at that time) in the studio and we brought out the drums much more than for the previous album. I think I was singing better, also. My manager felt that the song LUKA was a hit from the beginning. I was sceptical, to say the least. But, yes… we were all trying to make a commercial album that would live up to the promise of LUKA. To my surprise, it really worked.

Listening back, I was struck by just how timeless the recordings seem. Some of that’s down to the songs, the style of the songs, but was there ever record company pressure on you to “go a certain way”?
No, actually. I had something unusual. I was signed to a production deal with my manager. So, in effect, I was signed to Ron Fierstein and he was signed to A&M. So if there was any pressure like that it went to him, and not to me.

It’s a very warm sounding record, despite the coolness of the recurring lyrical themes of loneliness, restriction, oppression… There is some bitter-sweet comfort to be taken, I think, that after 25 years of listening, those characters remain where they were when you parked them… But do you ever find yourself drawn to thinking about where they might be now?
Yes, actually, I do. I’ve written a song that’s a sequel to LUKA – which is called SONG OF THE STOIC (as yet unreleased). It’s set fifty years on, it’s not a very cheerful song and, I must say, not entirely truthful in its bleakness. But there is a part of my own psyche, obviously, which gets expressed in these songs.

Some of those characters seem impossibly incarcerated – really trapped – but accepting of it, like it’s become part of them as opposed to just something they deal with. LUKA, for instance: “Just don’t ask me how I am…”, and his “… After that you don’t ask why…”, Like he has developed coping mechanisms, events have become part of his personality…
… Stoic…

… but the character in IRONBOUND / FANCY POULTRY is, I think, a little different. She seems on the verge of… well, I’m not sure what… The words suggest someone who’s actively living but always one step removed. Behind glass somehow, either through poverty, loneliness, depression…
I loved the area of Ironbound, which is a part of Newark, New Jersey, with a lot of immigrants, a large Portugese community… I, myself, was avoiding getting married at the time of writing the song. I think I was afraid of feeling trapped. So I projected it outwards to a random woman from that area…

You wrote GYPSY when you were 18. Despite the sign off of “please do not ever look for me…” (which seems wistfully prescient a thing for a girl of 18 to have written), it strikes me as potentially the happiest song on the album – there is resolution, a decision…
I’d had a summer romance when I was 18, but I was afraid he’d show up at my door and that my stepfather would be angry – so that’s why I said that, that line. I’d been teaching young children to disco dance and play folk music, at a summer camp, and he was also teaching there. We had this romance, and at the end of the summer I knew he would be going back to England, where he was from, and I’d be going back home to New York. So I wrote this song for him, as a gift. In return, he gave me his bandana… We’re still good friends, actually. We see each other every year, and we exchange e-mails.

It was written before most of the first album, but you didn’t include it…
That’s right. I felt that the song was too folky for the debut, so I didn’t include it. I’d wanted the first album to really be the weird mixture that it was…

Were there other older songs you were able to bring to the table for the second album? Or did you find yourself going through an intense period of writing?
I had a lot of songs. I chose all the ones I thought were good enough, from the hundred or so that I had at the time. But I did write new songs for SOLITUDE STANDING…

… and the record has a more complete band feel to it…
The band was there from the inception, so the music and arrangements were more integral.

On SOLITUDE STANDING, the song TOM’S DINER is in that pure vocal form…
I’d thought it would be fun to write a song that was like a little film, a kind of French film soundtrack. But I didn’t play piano, myself, and nor did I know anyone who could. So it stayed a cappella…

… and it became something else entirely when DNA remixed it in the early 1990s – a huge club hit. My guess is this opened up your ears to the possibilities of expanding “the Suzanne Vega sound”… Some of what followed sounded like you were ready to go out dancing..?
Actually, I had been a dancer for ten years. Most of my training in life was as a dancer… I was always happy to experiment with sounds and production. That’s if I liked it myself. I really liked what DNA had done with TOM’S DINER. It made me feel that an audience would probably accept more from me. I was already straining to do more, on the DAYS OF OPEN HAND album… But BLOOD MAKES NOISE (from 99.9F) was the first thing producer Mitchell Froom and I did together, and we surprised even ourselves on that day. I felt we were really onto something.

There’s a one-off SOLITUDE STANDING full album show in the UK soon…
Yes. We did a similar show in Boston in July, which was great, and we’re also doing one in New York this week. The SOLITUDE STANDING album really took off in the UK so we thought London was an obvious place for a European celebration of the 25th anniversary. It’s next week, Tuesday 16th October, actually. At the Barbican.

… and CLOSE UP: SONGS OF FAMILY, the fourth in a quartet of CDs of re-recordings, has just come out… What are your intentions after that, Suzanne? More concentration on the play you’ve written about 1940s author Carson McCullers, perhaps? Or a new album?
I’m finishing up the Carson McCullers play, yes. And I do have a series of new songs that I’ve been trying out, here and there. As you know, the music industry is a changed thing from what it once was… So next time will be my first time for putting out a record of original material, new songs, without having a deal… So we’ll see what my options are. We’ll see how it goes…

THE MOUTH MAGAZINE

Suzanne Vega / Taking Names

 

Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega

Taking Names

By John Seabrook

February 7, 2010

Suzanne Vega went to see her dentist the other day, in Greenwich Village, and afterward she had a late lunch by the window at the Cornelia Street Café, an old Village haunt where she first got noticed as a singer-songwriter, in the early eighties.

Suzanne VegaIllustration by Tom Bachtell

“Apparently, I’m grinding my teeth in my sleep,” she said, after ordering a latte, “so my dentist fitted me for one of those”—she cupped her fingers around her mouth—“things.” Isn’t teeth grinding related to tension? “Uh, could be,” she replied, in a tone that signified “duh.” It’s not so much her new project, “Suzanne Vega Close-Up,” that’s making her tense; it’s that she’s paying for it herself.

Vega explained that a couple of years ago, after she was dropped by her record label, “I noticed that a lot of artists, like Carly Simon and Dar Williams, were recording acoustic versions of their songs, which is a way of owning the masters. You don’t own the original recordings, but at least you own something.” So Vega saved up some money, and in the past year she has rerecorded about seventy of her songs, among them the hits “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” and other gems, like “Small Blue Thing” and “Bound.” Over the next two years, she will release a series of four collections of songs grouped not by era but by theme; the first volume, “Love Songs,” will come out in time for Valentine’s Day. “We’ll sell it off iTunes and our Web site, which will allow us to collect e-mail addresses, so when I want to release an album of new material we’ll know who the audience is,” she said, removing a navy cardigan and revealing a purple tunic underneath.

Vega was born in 1959 and raised in what was then called Spanish Harlem, and she thought that her stepfather, Edgardo, who was born in Puerto Rico, was her birth father until she was nine, when her parents set her straight. “With a face like this, I guess I would have figured it out eventually,” she said, framing her pale-skinned, blue-eyed countenance with her fingers. She attended P.S. 179, where she remembers being the only kid in class who could read. In second grade, she moved into a gifted-and-talented program at P.S. 163, where her teacher, Miss Feuerstein, encouraged her to write stories; she wrote several about an imaginary goat.* She attended the High School of Performing Arts (her fifteen-year-old daughter, Ruby, is a student there) and then went to Barnard College.

Her stepfather had a guitar in the house and would sing Lead Belly and Pete Seeger songs. Suzanne was eleven when she picked it up, and everyone told her how natural she looked with the guitar in her hands, so she learned some chords. There was a book of pop hits around the house; she remembered learning “Sunny”: “I liked the jazzy chords in that.” She was fourteen when she wrote her first song, and by the time she was sixteen she had about fifty. She played in coffee shops on the Upper West Side, where she met some people who told her about the Songwriters Exchange at the Cornelia Street Café.

“It was just this room back then,” she said, looking around. “We’d all cram in here and listen to each other.” After shows, she’d take names to add to her mailing list; when thirty people showed up at one of her first solo gigs, at Folk City, the owner of the club was impressed. She was signed by A. & M., and her first album, “Suzanne Vega” (1985), reinvented a pop archetype—the female singer-songwriter—that artists like Tracy Chapman and Sinéad O’Connor soon benefitted from. Her second album, “Solitude Standing” (1987), went platinum. Commercially, it was pretty much downhill from there.

“Now I’m back to where I started from,” she said. “Taking names, making mailing lists. I’ve taken on this somewhat risky thing, but it’s a relief not to have to deal with a record company, and their A.D.D. attention spans.” She picked up a forkful of salad. “At this moment, I feel at peace with it—I’ve let it all go.” She flung her arms out, pushing whatever tension was in her jaws away from her, and sending a piece of lettuce flying across the table. 

Published in the print edition of the February 15, 2010, issue.

John Seabrook has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1989 and became a staff writer in 1993. He has published four books, including, most recently, “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.”