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| Birth Name(s) : Suzanne Nadine Vega |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Singer, songwriter, record producer |
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Full Suzanne Vega Biography
Suzanne Vega (born Suzanne Nadine Vega, 11 July 1959, Santa Monica, California) is an American songwriter and singer known for her highly literate lyrics and eclectic folk-inspired music.
Vega's mother, Pat Vega, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish extraction. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish extraction and works in graphics. Her step-father, Ed Vega, is a writer from Puerto Rico.
When Vega was two and a half, the family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poems; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's prestigious High School of Performing Arts, now on Amsterdam Avenue between 65th & 66th Street in Manhattan. (This school was seen in the film musical Fame). There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.
While majoring in English literature at Barnard College, she performed in small venues in Greenwich Village, where she was a regular contributor to the Monday night songwriters group at the Cornelia Street Cafe. In 1984, she received a major label recording contract.
Vega's third album, Days of Open Hand (1990) signified a change in style: the music became more experimental, and the lyrics expressed greater emotion.
In 1992 she released the album 99.9F° ("ninety-nine point nine Fahrenheit degrees"). It consists of an eclectic mixture of folk music, dance beats and industrial music.
Her fifth album, Nine Objects of Desire, was released in 1996. The music varies between a frugal, simple style and the industrial production of 99.9F°. This album contains "Caramel", featured in the movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs and, later, the trailer for the movie Closer. A song not included on that album, "Woman on the Tier," was featured on the soundtrack of the movie Dead Man Walking.
September 2001 saw the release of a new album, Songs In Red and Gray. Three songs deal with Vega's divorce from record producer, Mitchell Froom.
At the memorial concert for her brother Timothy Vega in December 2002, she began as the long-term subject of a direct cinema documentary, Some Journey, by director Christopher Seufert of Mooncusser Films.
In 2003, she hosted the American Public Media radio series American Mavericks, about 20th century American composers, which received the prestigious Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
Vega has a daughter, Ruby Froom (born 8 July 1994). The band Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom album took its name from her, with Vega's approval, though she requested a slight change.
On 11 February 2006, Vega married Paul Mills, a lawyer and a poet. They originally met each other at Folk City on West 4th Street in 1981. In their own words, Mr. Mills proposed to Miss Vega in May 1983, and she accepted his proposal on Christmas Day 2005.
On 3 August 2006, Vega became the first major recording artist to perform live in the Internet-based virtual world, Second Life. The event was hosted by John Hockenberry of public radio's The Infinite Mind.
On 17 September 2006, she performed in Central Park, as part of a benefit concert for The Save Darfur Coalition. During the concert she highlighted her support for Amnesty International, of which she has been a member for nearly a decade.
In early October 2006 Vega took part in the Academia Film Olomouc (AFO) in Olomouc, the Czech Republic, the oldest festival of documentary films in Europe, in which she appeared as a main guest. She was invited there as the subject of the documentary film by director Christopher Seufert, that had a test screening at the festival. At the end of the festival she performed her classical songs, and added one brand new piece called "New York Is a Woman".
Vega is also one of the interviewed persons in the book Everything Is Just a Bet which was published in Czech in October 2006. The book contains twelve interview transcriptions from the talk show called Stage Talks that regularly runs in the Svandovo Theatre in Prague. Vega introduced the book to the audience of the Svandovo Theatre, and together with some other Czech celebrities gave a signing session.
She signed with Blue Note Records in the spring of 2006, and released Beauty & Crime on 17 July 2007. The album was produced by Jimmy Hogarth.
A few years ago, I used to see this group of children playing in front of my building, and there was one of them, whose name was Luka, who seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children. I always remembered his name, and I always remembered his face, and I didn't know much about him, but he just seemed set apart from these other children that I would see playing. And his character is what I based the song Luka on. In the song, the boy Luka is an abused child—in real life I don't think he was. I think he was just different.
Interviewer: When you can touch so many people with songs like "Luka," it must be pretty rewarding. Vega: Yeah. It’s an amazing feeling. Especially since that particular song is a very special song. It’s a song about child abuse, so therefore it does touch a lot of people in a different way than if it were, say, a love song or some other kind of song. |
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