Suzanne Vega made an adventurous development in her folk sound with the industrial electronic experimentation of this deep dark danceable delight. With the unexpected success of the DNA remix of 'Tom's Diner', Vega was ready to move in a new musical direction. She enlisted Mitchell Froom to produce her new album '99.9F°' and he ended up doing the next one as well: "Working with Mitchell was a lot of fun because he was bass-led. When we were working on those two records , Mitchell played a lot of the bass parts. He was influenced by soul music and Motown, so he brought a whole other side to the records I made with him. I didn’t want to let go of that."
With Vega on vocals and acoustic guitar, Jerry Marotta on drums and percussion, Bruce Thomas on bass, David Hidalgo on electric guitar, and Froom on keyboards and string arrangements; the sessions at Dreamland in Bearsville, NY, Sunset Sound Factory in Los Angeles, and the Magic Shop in New York City also included Richard Thompson, Richard Pleasance, and Tchad Blake on electric guitar; Michael Visceglia on fretless bass; Marc Shulman on bouzouki; Jerry Scheff on acoustic bass; Greg Smith on baritone sax; Sid Page and Joel Derouin on violin; Maria Newman on viola; and Larry Corbett on cello. Froom dissuaded Marotta from using standard drums and had him try anything else from kitchen utensils to indigenous instruments to produce a completely different sound.
'99.9F°' went to eighty-six in the US, fifty-six in Australia, thirty-eight in New Zealand, twenty-seven in Germany, twenty-four in Switzerland, and twenty in the UK. Froom was also nominated for a Grammy for Producer of the Year. Vega and Froom were married in 1995; they separated in 1998. Their daughter, Ruby Froom was born on July 8, 1994.
http://www.suzannevega.com/
'99.9F°'
"It is about internal temperature. When I refer to temperature, I mean the way you feel when you're aroused in some way, whether it's through fear, anger or love. The title stands for a slight fever. Cos the normal temperature in the Fahrenheit system is 98.6°. So it means a little sick. Enough to hear things in a strange way and enough to see things in a peculiar way. A little bit off the normal...It describes the stance of the album, which is not normal, off the norm, not wildly feverish but off the norm enough to create tension, enough to give you a straight dizzy hallucinatory feeling but not so much that you feel that you're out of your mind in listening to it. It seemed slightly hotter than maybe some of my other albums. the other albums have a much cooler tone to the whole sound of them."
'Blood Makes Noise' went to number one on the US modern rock tracks chart. Vega says: "If you have a song called 'Blood Makes Noise' you have to make noise with it, you can't sing it softly, with a guitar and have pretty voices in the back. You have to use the vocabulary of the song. When I had originally conceived it, I had no music. And in the beginning, when I was first working with Mitchell, I was very nervous, because he had worked with all of these heroes of mine, like Elvis Costello. So we were sitting in a room and I was feeling like an idiot, because in the beginning you don't know if the songs are any good. So I was looking at him and I said 'well, I have this song, it's kind of a weird song'. Then he asked 'how does it go?' and I replied 'I don't have any music for it' and he said 'well, just sing it'. So I just sang it into the air. I felt a little embarrassed but then I explained to him that I would like the song to sound like The Ramones, fast and nervous and with a lot of guitars. Mitchell listened to me but he threw that idea away. I didn't know that he had done that but he did. The next day I came in he already had the bass line and the crushing noise. For some reason it was funny to hear that bass line and that crushing noise with the music. It made me laugh and I thought that that was the right thing for that song, because it made me laugh and there was something about the way the music and the lyrics fitted together that was funny and sort of cynical but sarcastic at the same time. And I don't know why. It's one of those things that I would have to go and dissect it and analyze it. All I knew was that it made me laugh and it seemed good. So it was unintentional and I liked it. It fitted with my own sense of humor."
'In Liverpool'
"This was one I wasn't sure would fly, because it's bits and pieces, it's a mood really and a fantasy. It came about because I was on tour and I was in Liverpool and I was lying on the bed of the hotel we were staying in. And I was trying to take a nap and there was this enormous clamoring going on across the street. We were staying across the street from a cathedral. I started to think about one of my first boyfriends, who was from Liverpool. That started to put me in the mood of the books like 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', and things that had to do with bells, and the ringing of bells. I was thinking about old loves, so there was this sort of nostalgic feeling to the whole afternoon. So I took the moments that made sense and put them altogether in the song."
'Rock in This Pocket (Song of David)'
Vega says: "On a track like 'Rock In This Pocket', which is about King David, that's not about me and a man, necessarily. It's about a small person against an institution. I wrote this song before the riots happened in LA, but there's that sense of powerlessness and you want to get the attention from someone... and so you have a rock in your pocket and the urge is to throw it. It's not necessarily against a man, especially not a man whom I'm equal to. It's about someone in power, someone much bigger than I am."
'Fat Man and Dancing Girl'
"The way I was thinking of it was almost like a shadow puppet; the thing that is really causing the shadow is the thing that's behind the screen. Most of the show is concealed from view, meaning the real life no one sees. It's the thing that happens when I go home, or when I think about my own life or when I think about other people's lives. The thing that is the most interesting about people is the way they are when no one is looking at them or the way they are when they're in private. And to me that is the kind of show that I give. I don't give a glamorous show. I don't come on stage in costumes or outfits. In this particular song, I'm playing at being the dancing girl. But, when I say, "most of the show is concealed from view," the real heart of the whole show is the thing that I don't do on stage. It's the private part. The activity the lyrics point at is the real song."
'Song of Sand'
"It was intended to be about the Gulf War. It was probably as close to a political song as I'll ever get."
'Letter From New York' documentary
part 1
part 2
full album:
All songs written and composed by Suzanne Vega, except where noted.
1. "Rock in This Pocket (Song of David)" 3:20
2. "Blood Makes Noise" 2:28
3. "In Liverpool" 4:40
4. "99.9F°" 3:16
5. "Blood Sings" 3:17
6. "Fat Man and Dancing Girl" (Vega, Mitchell Froom) 2:19
7. "(If You Were) In My Movie" 3:05
8. "As a Child" 2:55
9. "Bad Wisdom" 3:23
10. "When Heroes Go Down" 1:54
11. "As Girls Go" 3:27
12. "Song of Sand" 3:28
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