Vega says she is thinking about appropriating Marlene Dietrich’s look for New Year’s Eve and focusing on songs that resonate with glamour and romance.
“And I’ll probably do ‘Blood Makes Noise’ too, just because that’s always interesting to play,’’ Vega says of the song that is more dire than glamorous.
Vega was reached a couple of days after returning from Prague where she attended the state funeral held for Václav Havel, the playwright-turned-dissident-turned-president. Vega says she admired Havel’s plays and politics long before meeting the former Czech president. Vega and Havel finally met after she performed “Tom’s Diner’’ on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2006.
“It was something broadcast back to him in Prague. He said he wanted to meet me, and after that he came to a few of my concerts,’’ Vega recalls. “He was an interesting man for his times. He had the courage to articulate a lot of different feelings of other people who could not articulate them.’’
Voicing myriad emotions is a skill Vega shares with Havel. Many of her songs are an act of immersion, with Vega delivering lyrics from the perspective of her characters, as was heard with her early hit “Luka,’’ sung in the voice of an abused child.
Vega’s style of writing has kept alive many of her songs, even ones she wrote back in her late teens and early 20s, such as “Gypsy.’’
“I’m not the same person now I was then when I wrote that song, but I can still feel it. I can still pull up the emotion,’’ says Vega, now 52. “I remember some woman once wrote about me performing that song and complaining it was not suited for someone my age, and this is when I was in my mid-40s. I just have to disagree.’’
Vega’s disagreement is based on the nature of her songwriting. She contrasts what she does as a songwriter to what her father did as a novelist.
