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NIGHT BEAT: Suzanne Vega moves on after a rough few years

The younger version of Suzanne Vega never thought she'd make a living as a singer, but she was confident in the long-term viability of her music.

"When I was a teen-ager, I used to think I would be like Emily Dickinson and not become discussed until after I died. But I guess I'm ahead of myself," Vega says, chuckling.

"I, of course, wish a bunch of songs were better-known, but you never know."

Maybe she'll be another Nick Drake, rediscovered decades after her best work, she says lightly.

"I try not to think about it too much," she says.

Vega, who sings Saturday at the House of Blues, is promoting her current album, "Songs in Red and Gray," her first collection of new material in five years, and the first since she and ex-husband/producer Mitchell Froom divorced in a public mess.

Judging by Vega's lyrics in "Songs in Red and Gray," you might think she's just a tad aggrieved, singing about what kind of weapon she might be -- "You said I'd be a gun, lethal at close range ..." -- and creating more poetry: "I'll never be your Maggie May, the one you loved and left behind, the face you see in light of day, and then you cast away. That isn't me in that bed you'll find."

But the sound of the album is not dark. Its up-tempo pop and adult-alternative melodies are vast revisions of folk music. And even the words aren't so much acrid as they are signs posted along Vega's journey from wife to single mother of a 6-year-old daughter.

"I'm glad it's not a downbeat album. I think people see the title and say, `This is her divorce album, and it's going to be bitter.' But it's not, really," Vega says. "It's a spiritual struggle."

"Songs in Red and Gray" also shows her changing musical directions again. She enjoys toying with public expectations of her music. Vega went from singing the folkie, child-abuse hit of "Luka," in 1987, to the dance-floor poetry of 1990's "Tom's Diner."

In 1992, she experimented with dream pop, and the dark, alternative sounds of "99.9¡ F" and "Blood Makes Noise."

By 1996, she was stretching into trip-hoppish lounge music with "Caramel" and dark, art-rock with "Birth-Day (Love Made Real)."

"I hate being predictable, and I don't like when you can tell what an artist is going to do," Vega says. "I'm not sure what my image is at this point. I got (stereotyped as) the `sensitive folk poet.' Stay home. Drink tea. Read poetry. Which I do, but ...

"I've really enjoyed my career, and part of it's being more and more myself, and not fitting a predictable caricature.

"When I started, there were two types of women, rock chicks like Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde, and folk waifs like Joni Mitchell. Now, there's a lot of variety. There are some more (women) on the radio."

Vega names pop singer Nelly Furtado, adult-alternative singer Jewel and "to some degree" singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant as examples.

"I think it's one of those things that goes in waves," Vega says. "Men are always there. ... Women come in waves, but I think things are better than they were."

For Vega, things got worse before they got better. The drama of the last few years goes: divorce, changing record labels, firing her manager and her assistant, selling her house, breaking her left arm three weeks before the late-September release of "Songs in Red and Gray" and experiencing the anxiety shared by her fellow New Yorkers after Sept. 11.

"It was one of the weirdest feelings, trying to work through all of it, and to go on the road and promote the album," she says of Sept. 11. (She's now producing a various-artists album on Sept. 11, to be sold through www.vega.net.)

Nevertheless, she sounds pretty optimistic, and she says she is.

"Surprise! Who'd've thought?" she says.

Her personal life changed her music both directly and indirectly. The most obvious change is that she didn't have Froom producing her album for the first time since 1996. Froom also took the band with him, leaving Vega with a task to completely restructure her accomplices.

"In some ways, (her musical relationship with Froom) was complicated, because I had a lot of fun with Mitchell. Our approach was open: `Let's run the amplifier into the bathroom,' " and that kind of thing, she says. "It was a very artistic (method), but I did get a lot of people going, `What's all that noise?'

"I feel what Mitchell and I did was appropriate to the songs. It was, like, what else can you do with a song called `Blood Makes Noise'?"

But "when (Froom) moved to California ... I was left with an acoustic guitar."

So she turned back to folk, she says, although "Songs in Red and Gray" is a future removed from her early influences: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro.

And poetically, the album seems like Vega's own observance of living on, in that way that people do after divorce.

She puts it this way in the album's final song, "Widow's Walk": "Consider me a widow, boys, and I will tell you why. It's not the man, but it's the marriage that was drowned."

Of the song, she says: "It's hard, in a way, to (go through) a divorce, because there's no ritual to market. There's no ceremony. It's not like you have a wedding day," or rather the opposite of a wedding day. "You're left to yourself, and you just deal with it."

Her own marriage was "like a vessel. It seemed big, and it seemed like I'd try to be at the wheel of it," but it wouldn't respond to her actions, she says.

Or as she sings in "Widow's Walk": "Though I saw it splinter, I keep looking out to sea, like a dog with little sense, I keep returning, to the very area where I did see the thing go down, as if there's something at the site I should be learning."

Showtime at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay is 6:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $25-$35 at the box office, 3950 Las Vegas Blvd. South, and through Ticketmaster. To charge by phone, call 632-7600.

DOUG ELFMAN
MORE COLUMNS

Suzanne Vega comes to the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay Saturday night.