For the follow-up, Vega overcame writer's block to craft an eclectic batch of new material, and drew upon a backlog of songs that hadn't fit the debut. Again produced by Kaye and Addabbo , Solitude Standing was Vega 's finest achievement; the richness and variety of its compositions were complemented by the lusher full-band arrangements and more accessible albeit less folky production.
The album's lead single, "Luka," was a haunting first-person account of child abuse, whose terse and fictional lyrics struck a chord with American radio listeners.
As a result, the album was an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic; it debuted at number two in the U. As record companies rushed to fill a market niche they hadn't known existed and uncovering some major talent in the process , Vega spent almost a year on the road touring in support of the record; exhausted, she returned to New York to take some time off, and also tracked down her biological father for the first time.
Vega began to experiment with her lyrics, pushing beyond the narrative story-songs that dominated her first two records, and had minimalist composer Philip Glass contribute a string arrangement. Even though the album didn't recapture Vega 's popularity, she was still -- indirectly -- involved in one of '90s most bizarre hit singles.
Two British dance producers working under the alias DNA took the a cappella Solitude Standing track "Tom's Diner" and set it to an electronic dance beat, releasing the result as a bootleg single called "Oh Suzanne. The following year, Vega gathered a number of other unsolicited versions of the song and compiled them as Tom's Album.
Intrigued by the success of "Tom's Diner," Vega began looking for ways to open up her musical approach. Froom applied his trademark approach -- dissonant arrangements, clanging percussion -- to Vega 's album, and while Froom and Vega began dating several months after the record's completion, and they wound up marrying; their daughter, Ruby, was born in , and Vega naturally took some time off from music.
She returned in with Nine Objects of Desire , again with Froom in the producer's chair, though his approach was somewhat less radical this time out; in terms of Vega 's subject matter, there was a newfound physical sensuality borne of her marriage and childbirth experiences. In , Vega released the best-of retrospective Tried and True , taking stock of her past career she had also split with longtime manager Ron Fierstein ; she also published her first book, The Passionate Eye, a collection of poems, lyrics, essays, journalistic pieces, and the like.
Vega began playing shows with bassist Michael Visceglia again, and worked on material addressing the breakup of her marriage. Songs in Red and Gray was released in the fall of and marked a return to the more direct sound of Suzanne Vega and Solitude Standing ; it also garnered her the best reviews since those records. In , Vega released Close Up, Vol. The final release in the sequence, Close Up, Vol. In early she demo'ed new material with the help of Gerry Leonard , her live musical director.
This resulted in the album Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles , which was released in February In , Vega staged a one-woman theater piece in which she performed a song cycle about the life and work of novelist Carson McCullers , written in collaboration with Duncan Sheik. The album was released through Vega 's own label, Amanuensis Productions.
AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Often bracketed in the genre of southern gothic, McCullers wrote about her characters with an acute appreciation for human diversity and vulnerability.
For Vega, the novelist was decades ahead of her time. She was interested in writing from the point of view of black people. And she embodied these things. She was deep in everything she wrote, and I think she suffered from it too. Like her heroine, Vega also has a gift for narrative empathy. Her songs often feature characters that feel novelistic in their realisation. After all, Luka was about the abuse of a young boy.
Vega grew up in the Latino neighbourhood of East Harlem in New York and until she was nine years old, she believed that her stepfather, the Puerto Rican writer Ed Vega, was her father. All kinds of issues came up, mostly of identity. And suddenly to be told that I was not Puerto Rican at all, that I was white! In her teens and early 20s, when she was reading a lot of revolutionary writers, she felt uncomfortable with her ethnic status. For the past 10 years she has been married to a lawyer called Paul Mills, and she has a year-old daughter from a previous marriage to the musician and record producer Mitchell Froom.
She married a soldier and wannabe writer, Reeves McCullers, when she was just 20, and thereafter suffered a torturous relationship based on that familiar but unhealthy dynamic of not being able to live together, and not being able to be apart. It ended 16 years later, after various splits and reconciliations, a divorce and remarriage, with Reeves killing himself in what he hoped, mistakenly, would be a double suicide pact with his wife. She took his name, but he kept trying to take bits of her identity, forging her cheques and professing to have all this writing talent himself, though he never put anything on the page.
There were rumours, the kind often associated with successful women, that it was Reeves, who was the real author of the work. Vega knows the syndrome well. Her first husband produced her fourth album, which marked a significant shift towards a more electronic style of music. At the time there were suggestions that Froom drove the change. But while McCullers was the obvious author of her own work, Vega believes her writing lost something when Reeves died, some of its earlier passion and social vision.
What McCullers never lost, and Vega makes gentle fun of in one song entitled Harper Lee, is her competitive spirit. She appreciated the satire much more this time. But what she really loves are biographies, particularly of creative people. This is what his room looked like.
You have this troubled life and you figure, where am I going to put all this? And you put it on the canvas or the page as overspill in a way. What survives from that overspill is entirely unpredictable. She wrote the song in and it lay dormant for five years, before becoming a huge global hit. Her work, she says, is growing more relevant by the day. The fact that gay people can marry each other now is an amazing leap forward.
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