Suzanne Vega, singer- songwriter and poet is now a mother, and so, is performing a whole new repertoire-first "Itsy, Bitsy Spider," then "Baa Baa Blacksheep," and then (because her audience is growing restless), a flourish of a finale: "Home on the Range."

     When the last chord ends, Ruby, Suzanne's two-year-old daughter--and greatest fan--claps gleefully and shouts, "'Gen!"

     Not long ago, Suzanne's repertoire was written mostly in the deep quiet of her mind. There, she imagined songs and verse that earned her a reputation as a hallmark songwriter of her generation.

     But in her thirties, Suzanne found herself hungering for something she could not even fully imagine-a child. What she has now is a triumph of a toddler; Ruby's spirit revels in life as much as Suzanne revels in the solitude of her mind.

     For Suzanne, motherhood changed everything. Her body has grown more substantial and her sleep is frequently interrupted and her voice is more powerful than ever. In the first months of Ruby's life, Suzanne's thoughts, once clearly focused on artistic expression and her career, became cloudy.

ruby froom,
         suzanne and
   pat vega

     "I'd say, Can I still think? And yeah, I can. But can I really be original? Are the old brain muscles still what they used to be? And sometimes I felt like I was deprived of all my dreams. And I worried that without the dreaming, the songs lost some of their luster. Instead of coming up with a brilliant answer, you come up with an average, normal, everyday one. Because that's what your brain is doing. Well, what are you going to feed the baby? Peanut butter and jelly--very easy, connect-the-dots thinking, and it's your dreams where you get the wild brilliant stuff.

     "People used to tell me as a kid 'Oh you think too much.' I don't think so. I like thinking. I will spend hours doing it. I feel safe there. So to find that part of my brain was suddenly fuzzy around the edge did not make me happy.

     On the other band," Suzanne says, "I get this great sense of well-being when I spend time with Ruby--you know, I love those things like giving her a bath, and sniffing her and stuff."

     Suzanne grew up in Manhattan and East Harlem. The oldest of four, she was a remote, guarded child who was serious and driven--the one who shouldered adult responsibilities, often

cooking. cleaning, and entertaining her siblings. Her mother, Pat, went back to school, eventually earning a masters degree in economics. Her stepfather, Ed Vega, was a writer.

     At a young age Suzanne was playing with songs and rhyming words. Her mother remembers hearing her sing.

     "You were about three," her mother, who's visiting Suzanne and Ruby for the day, recalls. "You were listening to the radio and you sang. You just made up a perfect blues. It was very soulful. It bad the correct pattern. It was amazing."

     Suzanne started writing when she was six. By age seven, she was writing poetry. Two years later, she was composing songs.

     Her first album (self-titled), released in 1985, was expected to sell about 30,000 copies. Instead, it sold a million worldwide. Solitude Standing, her second album, sold more than 3 million worldwide. It included the song "Luka," a spare, unsentimental look into the world of an abused boy--an unlikely hit that became one of Suzanne's signature songs.

     By the time she had Ruby, with husband Mitchell Froom, Suzanne was widely regarded as one of the most brilliant songwriters of her generation. But for the first year of Ruby's life, Suzanne was certain she was writing "garbage."

     "I felt like I was working on half a cylinder," Suzanne recalls now. "I can see why somebody like [rock musician] Patti Smith would just give up the music--because you feel like you're compromising one thing for the other....But then there's another theory that says you can't just devote yourself to your art and live in a box. Your art grows out of human experiences, and that means whatever heartaches you have, and it's very human to have a baby and have a husband and have difficulty figuring all that out--that's bound to feed what you write about."
now, two years after Ruby's birth, Suzanne is about to
release her first post-Ruby album, Nine Objects of Desire,
and has started traveling again. She's discovered that her

art is not diminished, but is different, richer in a way she never could have expected.

     "I have this great sense of wonder about it--that my body has done this great thing...given me this lovely person. I really didn't have anything to do with it consciously. It's not anything our mind has to do with. It's not like a song where if you don't like the chorus you can throw it out and get a new one. I wouldn't have known how to put a baby together. If you asked me, I couldn't do it. I couldn't draw a diagram. But somehow here's this great living person with such a big spirit."

     If Suzanne's traveling, Ruby still keeps her mother's voice at her fingertips, with a cassette recording Suzanne made especially for her.

     Ruby turns on her tape recorder and she demands to hear her mother sing," says Pat. "She carries it around all the time-- she plays it constantly. [Ruby's nanny] has to try and coerce her to listen to something else. She will watch 'Winnie the Pooh,' but she wants to hear her mother."

From Daughters & Mothers by Lauren Cowen and Jayne Wexler.  Copyright 1997 by Lauren Cowen (text) and Jane Wexler (photos).
Published by Courage Books, an imprint of Running Press Book Publishers, 125 South Twenty-second Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103-4399