July 11: eclectic folk-inspired singer Suzanne Vega - "Tom's Diner," "Luka" - is 54-years-old today.

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Suzanne Nadine Vega was born July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California. When Vega was two and a half, the family moved to New York and she grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poetry; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's High School of Performing Arts. There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.

While majoring in English literature at Barnard College, she performed in small venues in Greenwich Village, where she was a regular contributor to Jack Hardy's Monday night songwriters' group at the Cornelia Street Cafe and had some of her first songs published on Fast Folk anthology albums.

In 1984, she received a major label recording contract, making her one of the first Fast Folk artists to break out on a major label. Two of Vega's songs (both from her second album Solitude Standing, 1987) reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner." The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA.

On August 3, 2006, Vega became the first major recording artist to perform live in the Internet-based virtual world, Second Life. The event was hosted by John Hockenberry of public radio's The Infinite Mind.

She signed a new recording contract with Blue Note Records in the spring of 2006, and released Beauty & Crime on July 17, 2007. The album was produced by Jimmy Hogarth, which won a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Her contract was not renewed and she was dropped in June 2008.

However, in 2007, Vega followed the lead of numerous other mainstream artists and released her track "Pornographer's Dream" as podsafe. The song spent two weeks at #1 during 2007 and finished as the #11 hit of the year on the PMC Top10's annual countdown. Vega joined the 10th annual Independent Music Awards judging panel to assist independent musicians' careers. She was also a judge for the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Independent Music Awards.

A partial cover version of her song "Tom's Diner" is used to introduce the 2010 British movie 4.3.2.1, with its lyrics largely rewritten to echo the plot. This musical hybrid was released as "Keep Moving."

 

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For more about Suzanne, visit her Website at –

http://www.suzannevega.com/

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