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Suzanne Vega

An intelligent young woman in the big city observes her own life and the lives of others with cool detachment - she has lovers, but often feels alone - she reflects on it all & distils it into music. When I first heard 'Marlene on the Wall' and some of the other tracks from this album they held a tremendous appeal: I was sixteen, and longing to escape from the dead-end small-town I grew up in. The kind of urban milieu descibed in, or implied by her songs was where I yearned to be.

The milieu I found in London when I moved there a couple of years later didn't match up, needless to say, with my prior fantasies. What I did find there, in a market stall somewhere, was a cassette bootleg of a Suzanne Vega concert. I believe it must have been a show she did at the London School of Economics in October '85 which had been broadcast on Radio 1. It was a fine performance, well-recorded, and with some endearingly awkward inter-song chatter. For some time that was the only music of hers I owned, but I recall later getting hold of this and her second album too.

After the early '90s I rather forgot about her, but was pleased to be re-acquainted with her debut record on picking up a vinyl copy about four years ago. To hear it now is to experience a kind of double exposure, with my recollections of what the songs meant to me as a sixteen, eighteen or twenty-year-old overlaid with how I feel about them now. To my ears, the music has aged reasonably well, if not perfectly; and there's still something to enjoy in every track. 'Marlene on the Wall' remains a favourite, for example; but the springy slap-bass in 'Neighbourhood Girls' now brings the Seinfeld theme to mind, retrospectively lending it some unintentional bathos.

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