Suzanne’s brilliant career

In an era when just making it to your second album seems to warrant some sort of lifetime achievement award, a career spanning twenty years is something to be genuinely celebrated. When it is a career that has had more twists and turns than a David Beckham transfer deal, it needs to be marked in a proper fashion – as Suzanne Vega has done with her Retrospective collection.

“I knew pretty much what people like to hear from touring,” she says from her German hotel room. “It’s pretty obvious what people like, they either shout it out or respond really well. There’s been a core of songs throughout the twenty years that I’ve been doing this that people want to hear – and then there are some other songs that could go either way.”

Isn’t the process somewhat akin to looking through old photo albums? We all know how embarrassing that can be.

“I like looking at old photos but I don’t always like listening to old recordings,” she says. “I go back on the old songs because I sing them all the time. I put it together in a way that made sense to me and then I sat down and listened to it. I was actually really happy with it.”

With the acoustic-based singer songwriter genre having proved such a bankable one in recent years, it’s easy to forget that when Vega made her breakthrough from the clubs and bars of New York with ‘Marlene On The Wall’, artists like her simply didn’t have hit records. It was quite a leap.

“It was huge. Most people had thought of it as a type of writing that was over with, or was not contemporary. I think my success surprised a lot of people”.

Among them, the countless record companies who turned her down, including her ultimate home label A&M, who rejected her twice just for good measure. Did she see herself as a folk singer?

“I have a folk root in what I do, but I’ve also written a lot of other kinds of songs. With an acoustic guitar you can be really avant garde, you can be punk and have an acoustic guitar. Now people are blending together all these different influences.”

That blending of influences became a feature of Vega’s later work, something that was famously kicked off by the DNA remix of the stark ‘Tom’s Diner’.

“I had an album called Days Of Open Hand out at the time that the DNA remix was released, and I was already working more with synthesized sounds and different rhythms. The DNA guys came along and were much more popular than my record was. It gave me confidence to do what I felt would be entertaining, as well as retaining the more folk aspects of what I was doing.”

From there she would delve even further into the possibilities of the studio with remarkable effect, especially on the likes of ’99.9?F’ and ‘Blood Makes Noise’ – although when she returned after five years in 2001 with the album Songs In Red And Gray the acoustic element had returned, albeit tempered with a technological flair.

Having been a pioneer for whole singer-songwriter movement, she is perfectly placed to comment on the plethora of sensitive types who have followed in her wake.

“I think some people are really good at it and others are not. To me, it’s really interesting when you mix it with techno sounds and the like. You either have to be really good at it and tell interesting stories or be interesting sonically for me to be attracted to it.”

As Retrospective undoubtedly proves, these are two qualities that Suzanne Vega has in abundance.