 LIKE troubadours Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who were a huge influence in her own teens, Suzanne Vega became something of an iconoclast for gaggles of angst-ridden young adults in 1980s Britain and America; regarded by them as a living embodiment of Prozac as they gorged on her whimsical polemic and social parodies. Mind you, it transpires she might have blown her chances of becoming a close chum of her hero, Mr Dylan, after penning a piece in the New York Times that pondered accusations that he’d borrowed lyrics and metaphors for last year’s Modern Times album from a largely unknown American Civil War poet called Henry Timrod. The story has done the rounds, as Suzanne hastily explains during our chat about her forthcoming tour of the UK, and there was a certain glee in the manner of the American media’s chewing up of The Old Croaker. “Well, the New York Times asked me to write about my views on this,” says Suzanne, whose career first went into a kind of spin when she tore into the charts and the emotions with the evocative Luka – a tale of child abuse. It was, she has confirmed since, about a little boy who lived upstairs from her then apartment in New York. “But I didn’t write it as a chastisement but to seek understanding and for people to have empathy rather than be outraged,” she commented. The one-time secretary in a publishing firm really hit the high spots two decades ago when her second album, Solitude Standing, pitched her out of the confines of the folksy, bohemian beginnings in her adopted Greenwich Village. It was there that the Santa Monica -born singer fell under the spell of Dylan – whose spectre was still wafting around the place 20 years after he’d shifted tectonic plates in terms of music and idolatry. And there, too, that she feasted on the torpor-laden prose of the ultra- lugubrious Leonard Cohen; confiding she would like to have his songs played at her funeral. Ahem. She bounced further up the popularity stakes three years after that defining album when a crowd of wacky British disc jockeys – collectively named DNA – put out her song, Tom’s Diner, as a remixed dance hit. Today, she’s unwittingly hailed among the new generation of yoof as a trailblazer because Karlheinz Brandenburg – the central developer of the increasingly ubiquitous MP3 format – used that same song as the subject for experiments in audio compression. And last year, she became the first major recording personality to perform live in avatar form within the online virtual world Second Life. | 
