Connecting with Vega

Can you have a lifelong relationship with someone you don't personally know?

That was the question that went through my mind as I watched American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega in concert at The Esplanade last week.

Onstage she was her usual chatty self and was telling the story of how she came to write Gypsy, one of the oldest songs in her catalogue. As a teenager, Vega had met a British boy one summer at a camp where she taught girls how to "write folk music and disco dance" and fell briefly in love.

I listened in that knowing way of an old friend who has heard the story told at many parties and gatherings before, and laughed gamely along with the audience at all the old jokes.

This may not have been the first time I heard the story, but still, it was the best re-telling yet. And I couldn't help but think back to the first time I had heard the song in 1987.

Amid the electronic clatter of pop bands like A-ha, Pet Shop Boys and Erasure, my secondary school friends and I had discovered the hushed acoustic sound of singers such as Vega and Tracy Chapman.

We would sit at the back of the classroom reciting by heart the lengthy but poetic lyrics of Vega songs such as Solitude Standing and The Queen And The Soldier. As young literature students, we were impressed both by the expansiveness of Vega's imagery and the pinpoint precision of the words she used to describe the world around her.

The singer was in her late 20s then. We knew from her songs that she grew up in New York City, amid the hookers, and the street markets that were a part of her Hispanic neighbourhood.

When she was nine, Vega found out that her Latino dad wasn't her biological father. That was when she finally realised why she looked a little different from her brothers and the other kids in the area.

Around the time I discovered her music, she went on her own quest of discovery - to find her birth father in California. She wrote a song about this, of course - Daddy Is White - but released it only many years later; and that was how I came to hear about it as well.

Anyway, long after we graduated and my friends and I went our separate ways, I continued to listen to Vega. Her subsequent albums were more infrequent and unsuccessful, but no less skilful and distinctive.

I remember 1990's Room Off The Street, which put the listener right next to a woman flirting with some fighter for a revolution.

"Every sigh, every sway,

You can hear everything that they say

Something's begun like a war or a family

Or a friendship or a fast love affair."

By 1996, the flirtation had become "a casual match in a very dry field" and a poker game between men and women.

"Lamebrain Pete wants to Spit in the Sea.

He's got a cool hand but it isn't for me.

Butcher Boy thinks he'll be splitting the pot

I've seen what he's got and it isn't a lot."

Each time an album arrived, sometimes after a span of five or six years, it felt like getting a letter from a pen-pal in the mail. Vega sings in a direct and almost conspiratorial tone, letting you in on the latest developments in her life, as well as her most recent observations and obsessions.

One such development occurred in 1992 when, as an undergraduate studying in Britain, I saw her live for the first time. She had taken on a new record producer, Mitchell Froom, for her new album 99.9F.

She was clearly smitten with him because she changed the sound of her music, which had become more arty and "industrial".

She even changed her image. I remember watching from the cheap seats in the rafters as this woman pranced around onstage dressed in fishnet stockings, occasionally singing through a loud hailer.

Vega married Froom three years later and they had a daughter, Ruby.

She apparently tried very hard to make the marriage work, but in 1998, it dissolved - in part due to an affair Froom had with another semi-famous singer, Vonda Shepard, who had appeared in the hit TV series Ally McBeal.

When I saw Vega again at the South Bank Centre on a visit to London in 2005, she seemed much changed.

She was still her chatty, personable self but her music had reverted to its stripped-back folk origins. The words, meanwhile, were a window into the difficult years that had gone by.

"Soap and water, take the day from my hand

Scrub the salt from my stinging skin

Slip me loose of this wedding band

Soap and water, hang my heart on the line

Scour it down in a wind of sand

Bleach it clean to a vinegar shine."

For me, the intervening years had been no less eventful. After university, I started work and entered a four-year relationship that was almost headed into marriage.

Realising that this was not what I wanted, I pulled on the brakes at the last minute. But shortly after, I met a person whom I thought would be the one and only love of my life.

But that five-year relationship also ended, in 2004. Sitting a year later just 20 rows from the onstage Vega, I felt her pain and shared her desire to wipe the slate clean and start anew.

Of course, life has a way of eventually righting itself.

That Christmas in 2005, Vega agreed to marry a lawyer whom she had first met two decades ago at a folk music club in Greenwich Village.

An announcement on her website said: "The couple met at Folk City on West 4th Street in 1981. Mr Mills proposed to Miss Vega in May, 1983, and she accepted his proposal on Christmas Day, 2005."

She went on to produce some of her greatest work after that - including a Grammy-winning album in 2007 about her hometown of New York City called Beauty And Crime.

Thousands of miles away in Singapore, I had also met someone new. And though we have our ups and downs, I'm happy to say that we are very much together today - as Vega and her husband are.

Back at the Esplanade last week, I found myself now just six rows away from the singer. She is now 54 years old and I am 41.

This time, I am finally close enough to see the details on the shiny gold shoes she wore with her black jacket and pants. If she could have seen me, she might have noticed the passage of time on both our faces and bodies.

She was in excellent form as usual but, sensing the limits of the audience that now attends her concerts, her approach was utilitarian.

She played many new songs to promote her latest album, Tales From The Realm Of The Queen Of Pentacles, which is loosely based on characters in a deck of tarot cards.

The rest of the time was spent trying to entertain as many as possible with her oldest and most recognisable hits, such as Luka and Tom's Diner.

As she sang these ancient songs, I was struck by the long and winding journeys both she and I had taken as individuals over the last three decades, leading up to this re-connection on an April Fool's night in Singapore.

I have never experienced wild adulation for Vega, never written a fan letter or queued for an autograph or t-shirt.

But I realise that she has become for me the best example of the ideal that music strives towards: to forge a connection between artist and listener and to leave a lasting emotional and artistic impact.

Such a connection is increasingly rare because so much of the music scene is fleeting. Too many songs have throwaway lyrics and tunes written purely for the moment, and the best artists often don't stay consistently good for very long.

Here's hoping that the connection continues for as long as it can.

ignatius@sph.com.sg

This article was published on April 7 in The Straits Times.

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