SUZANNE Vega still doesn’t shy away from the tough subjects. The Manhattan artist, who tackled child abuse with “Luka” back in 1987, writes about weighty subjects, such as the death of her brother and Sept. 11, on “Beauty & Crime,” her first album in six years.
Her topics, which also include her daughter, New York City and Frank Sinatra, would be pretty daunting to address in any medium.
“That’s why [the album] took a while. I would think about the songs for months,” she tells The Post. “Many times I’d see it clearly in my mind and wonder what words I would use to paint the picture.”
“Angel’s Doorway” is about a firefighter who survived 9/11. The evocative “Ludlow Street” remembers her brother, Tim Vega, a graffiti artist who died from alcohol abuse in 2002, while “Frank and Ava” focuses on the volatile chemistry of Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
On the album’s sleeve, Vega, who performs at Manhattan Center’s Grand Ballroom on Thursday, playfully dresses up as a “hard-boiled dame from the 1940s,” a reflection of her tune “New York Is a Woman.”
“It’s one way to describe New York. There are a billion adjectives to describe it,” she says.
“I wanted some words to describe that kind of woman and the city as I see it.”
While the album is quite personal, the 48-year-old Vega knows what to keep for herself.
“I only put what I want to put out there,” she says. “If I feel I’ve gone too far, I take it out. That’s partly why it takes so long to make an album. Because I’m always weighing what I’ve written.”
It was a slow process for several reasons. The single mom (she divorced her first husband in 1998) had to raise her daughter (now 13), find a new manager and get a new record contract – as well as cope with her own depression over so much loss.
In early 2006, however, life began looking brighter. Newly married to an old flame, she hired an engineer to help her record songs using GarageBand software at home.
When life got too distracting (“phones ringing or sick pets”), they worked at the engineer’s studio. Looking to get a record deal, she had an album’s worth of road-tested demos.
“It’s amazing that it was just last year. Nothing was done. Songs weren’t done. I didn’t have a contract,” she says. “When Bruce Lundvall [president of Blue Note] called me at 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and said he loved the demos, that was a great moment. He said: ‘The poetry is great; the melodies are beautiful; I can’t stop listening to this.'”
After that she took her GarageBand demos and re-recorded them with an orchestra, adding lots of strings.
And while you might think “Beauty & Crime” refers strictly to New York, the title itself actually refers to musical production. The “beauty” refers to the strings and more orchestral parts of the album, while the “crime” represents the loops and the “remix mentality of the beats and the rhythm parts,” she explains.
“We would actually say, ‘We need more of a crime element.’ We were trying to get a balance.” With a new album – along with a new record deal and new husband – life is more balanced for Vega now, as well. “It made me feel like I’ve got the ground under my feet again,” she says.