Suzanne Vega speaking, from a hotel room in Seattle: "I've been here for a couple of days. And I've put a potted plant of orange flowers on the window sill, and I have the ice bucket filled with flowers, too. My guitar's standing in the corner, and I have black-and-white postcards all over the mirror. Cannery Row is on the bed."
    In the final week of a seven-week tour of "a million" cities, Vega (along with three backing musicians, a manager and a roadie) is on the stump in support of her critically and publicly well-received self-titled first album, for A&M (50,000 units moved since late April). The record, which she'll showcase in two shows Monday night at the Roxy, is a smooth bit of singing/songwriting that at once calls to mind Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and the Roches, and which accomplishes the neat trick of making a genre long out of vogue -- folk-based acoustic pop -- seem not merely attractive but positively progressive, a viable new strain for the musical mid-'80s. "The album's made both the punk station and the easy listening station here," says Vega, just turned 26. "I think that's very funny."
    Born in Santa Monica and raised in Manhattan, Vega has been writing since age 14, when she fell under the exotic (by Upper West Side standards) spell of such folk stalwarts as Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie and -- "you'll die" -- John Denver. In that thrall, she wrote her first pieces, pictures from a city girl's idea of the life of a country girl; eventually she realized that the life of city girl was grist enough for her mill, and her work now crackles with a real street energy.
    At 16, she began singing in public, while attending New York's Performing Arts High School, where she majored in dance, a passion she abandoned in recognition of her temperamental disinclination to take direction. "The school was a lot grungier than in the movie, Fame, but it did have that intensity and drama to it. I went back to visit, and in the course of an hour you'd see three different kids burst into tears. And if you weren't frenzied and driven, you were catatonic and withdrawn, like I was. I was very internal."
     At age 20, guitar in case, she moved away from home and into Greenwich Village (her home to this day). It was there, in the Village's hardy folk clubs, that she developed the talent and built the reputation which has since brought her out of her shell, into national consciousness and onto "the road," where she is presently enjoying herself quite a bit.
     "It's been really amazing to see America," says Vega. "I'd never done that before. And I like being able to talk to all the different kids who come up after the show to tell you what they're thinking about or why they like you or why they think you could be better. Chicago was pretty wild. There were so many kids there that my guitarist said if they let one more person in, someone would have fallen out the back. People were sitting on the stage. San Antonio and Baltimore were like that, too. In Denver, we had 1,400 people. It's a little surprising. I'm pleased. I try to appreciate it. I always worry that the audience must be hot and uncomfortable, and I wonder what would happen if they didn't like it, if they rushed the stage. But it's very exciting, having them right in your face.
     "And I had my birthday on the road," she says, "down South, so everybody was very hospitable. All week people would bring down cakes. We had about five birthday cakes. In Houston, this guy had a huge cake in the shape of a V, with at least 26 candles on it, which I had to blow out in front of everybody. It was mortifying -- it took me two or three blows before I could even hit the cake, I was so excited."

by Robert Lloyd