Former Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye was brought in to co-produce the debut with Addabbo and lend it a smoother, more contemporary flavor. After three years of rejections, Vega and her managers Ron Fierstein and Steve Addabbo finally convinced A&M (which had turned her down twice) to give her a shot, and she signed a contract in 1983. Record companies were reluctant to take a chance on a singer/songwriter steeped in folk music, however, since they saw little chance of any commercial returns. Vega graduated from college in 1982 and held down several low-level day jobs while quickly becoming the Greenwich Village folk scene's brightest hope. Vega discovered a new voice and sense of possibility for her original material, and her writing grew rapidly. In 1979, Vega attended a Lou Reed concert, and the effect was a revelation: here was an artist chronicling the harsh urban world Vega knew, with the detail and literacy of a folk artist. She subsequently enrolled at Barnard College as a literature major, and during this time, she began playing at coffee houses and folk festivals on the West Side and near Columbia University she soon moved up to the Lower East Side/Greenwich Village folk clubs, including the famed Folk City club where Bob Dylan started out. At age 14, she made her first attempts at writing songs however, when she attended the High School for the Performing Arts as a teenager, it was to study dance, not music.
Her parents often sang folk songs around the house, and when she began playing guitar at age 11, she found herself attracted to the poetry of singer/songwriter music (Dylan, Cohen), and found a refuge from New York's chaos in traditional folk (Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Joan Baez). A shy and quiet child, Vega nonetheless learned to take care of herself growing up in the tough neighborhoods of Spanish Harlem. Suzanne Vega was born July 11, 1959, in Santa Monica, California her parents divorced shortly thereafter, and after her mother (a jazz guitarist) remarried the Puerto Rican novelist Ed Vega, the family moved to Manhattan. She explored jazzy arrangements on 2007's Beauty and Crime, and wrote a musical one-woman show that was documented on the 2016 album Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers. Following their painful divorce, Vega returned in 2001 with her first album in five years, Songs in Red and Gray, which was greeted with her strongest reviews in a decade. Her association with - and marriage to - experimental producer Mitchell Froom during the '90s resulted in two intriguing albums, 1992's 99.9 F and 1996's Nine Objects of Desire. Vega's early commercial success helped open doors for a wealth of talent, as she scored a platinum album with 1987's Solitude Standing, and she would maintain a strong and dedicated cult following. Moreover, her left-field hit singles "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" helped convince record companies that folk-styled singer/songwriters were not a thing of the past, paving the way for breakthroughs by Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, Shawn Colvin, Edie Brickell, the Indigo Girls, and a host of others. Her hushed, restrained folk-pop and highly literate lyrics (inspired chiefly by Leonard Cohen, as well as Lou Reed and Bob Dylan) laid the initial musical groundwork for what later became the trademark sound of Lilith Fair, a tour on which she was a regular. Suzanne Vega was among the first major figures in the bumper crop of female singer/songwriters who rose to prominence during the late '80s and '90s.
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