Listen to Suzanne Vega in conversation with Pete Paphides

Listening to Suzanne Vega’s new album, Beauty and Crime, it’s hard to believe that this is the sound of a woman who released her first big hits, among them Luka and Tom’s Diner, exactly 20 years ago. Vega’s voice sounds so gently textured, so youthfully fluid, that it could belong to a big sister of the 12-year-old girl who provides backing vocals – except that the girl is Vega’s own daughter. And as other backing vocals come from KT Tunstall, it seems that Vega has gone one step further than staying young – she has stayed current.

Meeting up with the 47-year-old in Paris, after her string of European shows, I ask her the secrets of her Shangri-La ways. Is it her Buddhist chanting? The fact that Tom’s Diner was remixed into a million-selling dance hit, or that it was used to develop the first MP3? No – apparently, the secret lies in writing about characters such as Luke and the people inside Tom’s Diner, rather than spilling your own guts out, like so many “confessional” singer-songwriters.

“I’m fed up with it,” says the native New Yorker who was raised in Harlem by her German-Swedish mother and her stepfather, the Puerto Rican writer Ed Vega. “I have enough people telling me their feelings – my daughter tells me her feelings all day long. I think the secret to longevity is figuring out what parts are the core of yourself. It’s like looking at your wardrobe and figuring out what parts are you and which are just last year’s trend that you can grow out of. If you are always trendy and always changing then you have no identity.”

She’s not proselytising about how others should work things through, though – in fact, one emotional type for whom Vega does have time is the hard drinking 23-year-old Amy Winehouse, who sings about crying for lost loves on the kitchen floor with only booze for company. “Her feelings are amazing – they’re witty, they’re honest, they’re very wicked, and you have to have experience to sing those kinds of things.”

It’s unlikely that Amy Winehouse took her singing style from Vega, but there is a generation of women around now that owes something to her. Dido revealed in an interview that she learnt to sing by listening to Vega’s albums. As for Tunstall, Vega knew of her from watching the VH1 chart rundowns every Saturday with her daughter, but Tunstall had been a lifelong fan of Vega’s. The Scotswoman attended an American musical festival at 17 and saw Vega in the flesh. “I’d never seen this; a lone, guitar-wielding woman, no fancy clothes, no lipstick, no vocal acrobatics,” says Tunstall. “It was a turning point for me, when I became fixated on becoming a musician to the exclusion of anything else.” An unlikely description, perhaps, of a graduate of the School of Performing Arts (now LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), more commonly known as the school from Fame. But Vega was always more of a grower than a shower, preferring to play at Greenwich Village folk venues than jump around in Day-Glo leotards.

Her early work was groundbreaking in its deceptive simplicity. Vega admits that it may have been easier for her to forge a unique identity when she did, because there were so few other women in her position.

“When I was coming up, I saw my place clearly because the field was wide open. There was Joni Mitchell, there was Laura Nyro, there was Rickie Lee Jones, whom I identified with, and there was Chrissie Hynde.

And there was a big open space for me to do whatever I wanted.

“But there were many years of rejection in the early 1980s, when people saw a girl with a guitar and said, ‘Look, it’s not the 1970s any more; that era is over.’ And then they found out that it wasn’t really over, because once they took a chance and signed me, it sold way more than they had ever expected.” Thirty singles later, and now on her seventh album, she has been proved right.

The new album, which is largely a love song to New York, features other New York musicians including Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo – whom she managed to nab when he put in an unexpected call to the studio where she was working. But things didn’t quite turn out the way she was expecting. “I didn’t want to say, what I want from you is a big fat distorted guitar sound like on Heroesby David Bowie – but that was kind of in my mind. It all ended up a bit freeform.”

As for the big hits that launched her career, she insists that they are not thorns in her side. Instead, she seems genuinely touched that people still care about them. As she explains, “Two weeks ago I heard from a 15-year-old girl who said she had just heard Luka [the story of an abused child] for the first time. She said she had moved to a foster home aged 12 and that she felt like Luka was the story of her life. It’s astonishing really – this girl was 15 and the song came out 20 years ago.” Clearly, Vega’s work is still worth shouting about.

Beauty and Crime is out now on Blue Note. To hear Suzanne Vega in conversation, plus tracks from her new album, go to timesonline.co.uk/ podcasts

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