Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Nadine Vega, born in 1959 in California, moves to New York as a child – the New York inhabited by folksingers and mythologized as a new Babylon by Lou Reed. When young Suzanne takes her first steps in the legendary Greenwich Village, what appears before her is not so much a forgotten world as a playground of memories and echoes of the past, almost a stunning hallucination, the ideal habitat for the poems she secretly writes while still at school.

She's only twelve when the great Pete Seeger invites her onstage for her very first concert ever. From there, fame, reputation and success grow exponentially, until she becomes a sensation throughout the neighborhood, one of its most sought-after performers. She goes on to record her first demos for the "Fast Folk" magazines curated by the no-longer-young singer-songwriter and folk devotee Jack Hardy, and their circulation spreads well beyond the genre's borders.

The right people fall in love with her. Her acoustic technique, which enhances and modernizes that of Joni Mitchell, but even more so her understated, humble, almost breathless and absent singing, reveal the young Vega's crystalline talent to a shrewd rock veteran like Lenny Kaye and to Nancy Jeffries of A&M. The new batch of demos from 1984 only confirms it: Kaye works out the right tonal blends to pair with her stories, and the musicians to bring in (in fact an impressive array, given the young woman's rapid rise). The result is a spontaneity honed to perfection, all captured on the self-titled debut LP finally released in 1985 – a debut that sings the flatness of city life with the sweetest apathy, and which would prove influential on styles and genres bordering on the new folk-rock, a small, quiet revolution.

The whispered opening of "Cracking" (the closing of "Neighborhood Girls" mirrors it, but with an unusually vibrant and sustained southern-funk feel) sets the overall tone with the least possible effort, in a twilight music-box quality that brushes against Tibetan stillness while sinking into desolation.

What follows are little poems set to music with homemade, amateurish arrangements, more prey to her obsessions than to any real musicality: the leaden, sighing "Small Blue Thing", underscored by childlike electronic sounds but also by synths that stretch out the sorrow, is really a singable stream of consciousness, as if Vega had roughly staged her own imaginary psychoanalysis session.

Even more subliminal, impossible and mute is "Freeze Tag", entrusted almost entirely to the soft jingling of the acoustic guitar. The same goes for the refrain of "Knight Moves", a gem worthy of a baroque cantata that stirs up shivers of desolation, perhaps the quietest track here in its strangled flamenco touches. So too "Undertow", with chords sketched out in the darkness of a bedroom, granting only scant room to the dramatic choral swell of a chorus that fades out almost immediately, as if afraid to disturb the monotony in which it's set.

Perhaps a bit too literal in its narrative-metaphorical intent is "The Queen And The Soldier" (though it seems to foreshadow the Celtic tableaux of Loreena McKennitt). Above it all, though, stand two obsessively breathless incantations: the glacial, invocatory "Some Journey", carried by a voice that seems to vanish into its own words, into its questions and into the dark corners of her soul, and above all "Marlene On The Wall", a folk-rock masterpiece of imploded emotion that caresses a vision both mythological and melancholic.

A classic of intimate female singer-songwriting. Its introverted power and atmospheric magic stem from a shrewd fusion of its elements: a dreamlike voice, dark lyrics delivered as if in a fairy tale, sounds that are at once technological and chamber-like, and moving touches. A rarefied synthesis of two clashing anxieties – the yearning for emancipation of the Seventies and the urban unease of the Nineties – it foreshadows, unwittingly but not entirely so, a new generation of female singer-songwriters. Remarkable is the subtle, tightly-reined mise en place of the session players (and producers: above all the great Kaye), to whom Vega seems almost to transmit her own sorrow; only Darol Anger's dizzying electric violin near the end of "Some Journey" lets a flash of enthusiasm slip through. It was only discovered in Europe after the massive hits "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" from the following album, "Solitude Standing" (1987). It was revisited with acoustic arrangements in the 2010s across three of the four "Close-Up" volumes.

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16/02/2014