I Think I Hold My Ground

NME OCT 5 Introducing a product of NYC coffee society… Suzanne Vega.

- Mat Snow

I’d never been to a coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village before, but the Paradise was just as I’d imagined such a place to be from movies like Annie Hall. Loft people idle away the afternoon’s magic hour, and yuppie voices rise career-wise over the strains of piped Mozart and Vivaldi. Mmmmm, nice.

Yet here was I invading this haven from Manhattan’s street hassle with a little hatchetry on my mind. Parked at a spindly window table between myself and the towering Derek Ridgers sits the sylph-like Suzanne Vega, siren of the Nouvelle Vague of acoustic introspection.

Suzanne’s a Cancer, a lunar child who swims with the tides and captures the secret rhythms that swell and eddy beneath life’s surface. Sister moon stuff, tra la la, and while there’s a bit of that in me, there’s only enough to make me doubt momentarily my macho judgement that, yes, Suzanne Vega sings beautifully wistful music, but the words! My dear! Viewed in bollock-naked print, Suzanne’s world of interiorisation usually summons up but eight clanking letters –

“Precious,” she sighs, “is a word I hear a lot...” “I knew I wanted to be a folk singer from the time I was 16, partly because it was the music I had been brought up on. My father – he’s a novelist, Ed Vega – had played guitar, mostly blues: Leadbelly, “House Of The Rising Sun”. They were both very young when they married – my mother had me when she was 18 and she’d had all four of us by the time she was 24. My parents being so young, we had all kinds of music in the house from the ’60s – Dylan, Laura Nyro, a lot of stuff. I liked Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel – these things meant a lot to me.