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From Musician to Mom
An Interview with Suzanne Vega
By Laura Paul
"I love being a mother," Vega says. "It's very satisfying to me but it is hard. I spend time with Ruby on the phone. When I'm on the road, I call in every day. I have her homework faxed to me so we can go over that on the telephone."
Ruby sings, plays the piano and is passionate about writing. Vega, who was a literature major at Barnard College in New York City, says Ruby writes stories that go on for pages.
Vega herself is an avid reader. She was influenced by everything she has read from Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Emily Dickinson and John Steinbeck to Sylvia Plath, the wounded poet who took her own life and wrote poetry with the same kind of infinite sadness Vega portrays in many of her lyrics.
Vega, who sang in coffee houses and folk festivals during the genesis of her music career, had a book of personal poetry, lyrics and essays published in 1999 titled, The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings of Suzanne Vega (Avon, 1999).
Her minimalist writing style leaves open multiple interpretations for her work. "I have my own meaning but sometimes it has a double- or triple-meaning and so the works kind of stand up on their own," she says.
Meanwhile, her music has a hypnotic quality; she has always been drawn to rhyme. In the song Gypsy, for example, she writes, "Oh, hold me like a baby that will not fall asleep. Curl me up inside you and let me hear you through the heat."
Ruby often listens to her mother's music, enraptured by the acoustical guitar and her mother's voice. "She knows all of the lyrics," Vega says. "It's really kind of funny because I remember singing to her as a baby and being kind of shy in the beginning singing to her because I wondered, 'What if she does not like it? What if she doesn't like my voice or she doesn't like something about it?' As it turns out she loves to hear me sing. And as she has gotten older she is starting to listen to the lyrics and asks questions about them."
Vega believes that Ruby has talent, although amittedly, Mother and Daughter have very different voices.