Best of Design Matters: Suzanne Vega

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

In this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega about her latest album 'Flying with Angels,' her evo

Key takeaways

• Identity is fluid and can be redefined internally rather than through cultural labels.
• Emotional processing delays can foster deep introspection and artistic expression.

Main topics

• Identity and cultural fluidity
• Neurodivergence and emotional processing

Notable quotes

It took a long time to learn how to perform. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it. And in fact, that's a lifelong quest for me.

I learned to define myself from the inside using other signifiers. Since I'm a changeling, I feel that I don't need to mark myself in that way.

Conclusion

Suzanne Vega's journey reflects a lifelong commitment to authenticity, emotional depth, and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in September of 2025. Speaker 2 (0:06) It took a long time to learn how to perform. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it. And in fact, that's a lifelong quest for me. How do you embody the feeling and perform it in front of an Speaker 1 (0:20) audience? From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. Speaker 1 (0:31) On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Suzanne Vega talks about her latest album and opens up about the doubts she had early in her career. Speaker 2 (0:47) Finally, I started to feel like I am a musician. It's in my family. Speaker 5 (0:59) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Hi, Speaker 6 (1:29) I'm Adam Grant, host of the podcast Rethinking, a show where I talk to some of today's greatest thinkers about the unconventional ways they see the world. On Rethinking, you'll get surprising insights from scientists, leaders, artists, and more. People like Reese Witherspoon, Malcolm Gladwell, and Yo-Yo Ma. Hear lessons to help you find success at work, build better relationships, and more. Find Rethinking wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:57) For over four decades, Suzanne Vega has been one of the most distinctive and quietly revolutionary voices in music. From her songs Luca, which gave voice to the unspoken, to Tom Steiner, which became a cultural touchstone, and even the blueprint for the MP3, her music has blended the intimate with the universal. A poet of observation and empathy, Suzanne Vega has continually reinvented her sound. while staying true to her storytelling roots. With her new album, Flying with Angels, she once again captures the struggles and resilience of our times. Suzanne Vega, welcome to Design Matters. Thank Speaker 2 (2:39) you. Speaker 3 (2:40) Suzanne, I read that you've been mistaken for Cynthia Nixon, Beth Orton, Isabella Rossellini, and Molly Ringwald. What do you make of that range of doppelgangers? Speaker 2 (2:53) I don't know. I guess I remind people of something or someone. I think I'm a little bit of a shapeshifter, Speaker 3 (3:01) actually. I Speaker 2 (3:03) think it's amusing. Speaker 3 (3:05) Do you enjoy that sort of chameleon quality? Speaker 2 (3:08) Well, I've come to live with it. It took me a while to realize that was even happening. You know, when I was in my 20s and I started to do photo shoots, I realized that every photo looked different and I looked like a different woman in each photo. That is something I've never quite been able to figure out or to control is the whole. issue of image. So I don't bother with it anymore so much. You know, I work on certain things, but most people know me by my name and my voice. Speaker 3 (3:43) You were born in Santa Monica, but moved to Spanish Harlem when you were two. There you lived with your parents, your mom and stepfather, and in a multicultural household. How did that shape your sense of identity as a child? Speaker 2 (3:58) It confirmed the idea that I was a changeling, that I was mutable, that identity was mutable. Because I grew up close to my Puerto Rican relatives, to my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, and spoke Spanish, had been to Puerto Rico. And then later on, I realized, well, my stepfather told me that I had a different father. Speaker 3 (4:27) And you were nine when that happened, I believe. Speaker 2 (4:29) Yeah, I was nine. And so I thought I had my identity sort of down, you know, even though I was constantly getting feedback from kids in the neighborhood and other people who would see our family would sort of look at me and go, okay, where did she come from? Because in a sense, I was the red-haired stepchild, you know, literally that kind of stood out in our family. So I learned then that identity with something that could change, that could change overnight, and that ultimately I learned not to identify with cultural things like, am I Puerto Rican, am I white, that became something that could fall away, you Speaker 3 (5:13) know. So Speaker 2 (5:13) I learned to define myself from the inside using other signifiers. Since I'm a changeling, I feel that I don't need to mark myself in that way. I just find a way to be myself without joining any particular group. Speaker 3 (5:29) You've said that you've always felt more of an observer than a participant. And do you trace that to your childhood in a household that was both nurturing and volatile? Speaker 2 (5:42) Yeah, I'm sure some of it was, but some of it I think was also my nature. Over the years, I've come to wonder and believe that I probably am somewhat neurodivergent. Sometimes if you're neurodivergent, you have a delay in emotional processing. So I think I have that. And so therefore, there are times where maybe something's going on in the household and I have to respond. So because I'm not fully emotionally invested in the moment, that sort of comes later. It can be two days later. It can be a month later. It can be a year later. There's a sense of sort of delay where I process things. No matter what household I grew up in, I think I would still have a bit of that. It's interesting. Speaker 3 (6:29) I wonder if that... slight detachment, initial detachment is what has fueled some of your ways of communicating in other ways, whether it be performance or singing or acting or any of the other, certainly writing, other things that you do. Speaker 2 (6:49) Well, you know, it's interesting that you bring up acting because Sometimes people are like, why would you write a one-woman show and perform it for an hour and 45 minutes? Like, are you expecting to get other roles? Or like, are you expecting to like join the realm of great actresses? And I'm like, no, no, none of that. I'm not trying to be the next Meryl Streep. This is more, it was more like an exercise for myself where I could practice feeling. things in the moment and doing it over and over again so that I could practice. Here's where I feel sad. Here's where I feel happy. Here's where I feel the sadness of someone's death or, you know, I could, it was for myself almost as an exercise, how to connect myself with my feelings. So that's why I enjoy acting so much. And I've also enjoyed dancing for similar thing, different way of inhabiting your feelings. your body. So I do those things because I love to do them. And it makes me better at feeling my feelings in the moment. Speaker 3 (8:00) Yeah. Speaker 2 (8:01) Yeah. Speaker 3 (8:02) You picked up a guitar at 11 years old and wrote your first songs when you were 14. And I believe that the first song you wrote was titled Brother Mine. Yeah. What inspired that particular song? And what did you think of the song back then after you wrote it? Speaker 2 (8:19) There were a couple of things that had inspired that song. I mean, it was based on my brother, Matthew. who used to get into fights a lot. And so it was a song to reassure him that I still loved him, even though he got into fights. What had inspired me was the fact that my father, my stepfather, Ed, had also written a song to Matthew, sort of based loosely on the, my blue-eyed son, where have you been, my blue-eyed son. So he took a bit of that form and wrote a song for Matthew. which I featured in. I had my own little verse. So that was exciting. And I thought I too would write a song about Matthew. And I also loved the Judy Collins version of a song called Liverpool Lullaby, which I'd never heard a song like that. It was so beautiful and so real. The verse says, Oh, you are a mucky kid, dirty as a dustbin lid. When he finds out the things you did, you'll get a belt from your dad. So I thought I'd never heard a song that was so blunt. And the way Judy Collins did it was just shimmeringly beautiful and sad. So that was my template. I thought I want to write a song about my brother. And I liked it. I mean, it took me three years to write a song I thought was good enough to keep. because I had tried for three years. I thought it was never going to happen. From the years from 11 to 14, I mean, that was almost a quarter of my life spent trying to write songs. So I thought I was actually really bad at it. But then I wrote that one, and I thought, oh, that's not bad. Let me try another one. And then I wrote The Silver Lady, and then I thought, oh, I might be pretty good at this. Speaker 3 (10:07) I have spent... two decades now talking to artists of every ilk, and I always feel compelled to ask musicians and songwriters how they go about writing a song. Where does that come from? It's one of those, it's one of the artistic forms I feel is so mysterious and magical. As somebody that's done a lot of writing, as somebody that's done a lot of illustrating, I understand where both the motivation and the muse comes from. But with songwriting, it's a mystery. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how a song comes to you. Speaker 2 (10:51) Well, what you said is exactly right. It's a mystery. It comes to you. And you sort of have to set up the right atmosphere. You have to sort of invite it in without being too obvious. You know, you have to seduce the song. You have to make it comfortable so it can come to you and then present itself to you. If you're too obvious about it, it just goes somewhere else. So it took a while to realize that. That said, I think I've written a song at this point in my life in every way that there is to write a song. So if it's not coming to you and you've made it soft and comfy and given it special lighting and its favorite treats and everything, you know, and it's still not coming, then it's time to hit the thesaurus and the rhyming dictionary. And you just sit down and work on it like it's a crossword puzzle and just nail the thing. Sometimes it has to be that way. But there is a sense of calling something forth, prayer almost, in a really good song. And the best ones are when it starts to happen by itself. The language starts to rhyme and you get these rhythms and the melody shapes itself. Those are really wonderful moments. A Speaker 3 (12:07) couple of years after you wrote Brother Mine, the bass player Richard Davis heard the song and told you that structurally and formally, it was really good. And you've since included it on your 2012 album, Close Up Volume 4, Songs of Family. How do you view that song now? Do you see it in a different light, knowing that you wrote it when you were 14? It is a good song. Speaker 2 (12:32) Thank you. I think it's an anomaly for me, A, because it's a country song. You know, and it really does have a sort of, you know, major key, very country, which was, I was exploring that genre when I was about 14. I had been looking at not just country, but real folk, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, songs about traveling on the train, this kind of thing. So it's an anomaly because of that. But I like it. I like it because of that. And I like it because it has a kind of earnestness. And it's kind of funny. And I think that in the end, Richard Davis was correct. It does have a good form. And there are some things about the songwriting that is somewhat sophisticated. Someone pointed out that I draw this picture of my brother very clearly for an audience. which I would have had to have thought about that because I already knew him, so I didn't have to do that. But I did, you know, so I made it clear to an audience what I saw in my brother and what he was like so that they could understand it. And I thought, oh, that's well spotted. Speaker 3 (13:42) That's really well spotted, and it's given me a better understanding of why it's so much harder for me to interview people I know well. Because it's much harder for me to paint a picture. It just occurred to me. I've always wondered, why is it so much harder? Yeah. I understand your first performance as a singer was actually with Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall. Speaker 2 (14:04) Yes. Oh, what a thrill that was. Yeah. He came to my school looking for children to sit at his feet. He was doing a benefit for a couple of progressive schools in New York City. And I was determined. to get him to notice me. And I stood very close to him and sang as loudly as I could, which would, I don't know how loud that was, but I sang Guantanamera, like, you know, in his face practically. And he chose me and he chose everybody else on the stoop also. So we all were there at his feet and I loved it. I just remember the vast space of Carnegie Hall and the applause and Pete Seeger, who we knew. he knew his music growing up. So it was a splendid moment. And I think I resolved, that was probably one of the moments I resolved to not let go of that stage. Speaker 3 (14:59) By the time you were 16, you had written around 50 songs. Yet at that point, your heart was set on being a dancer. And that's what you studied at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts. Why did you choose dance over music at that time? Speaker 2 (15:18) Well, actually, I'll share a secret with you. When the music department teachers found out that I wrote songs, because I was always dragging the guitar around and playing at lunchtime, I played a few of my songs for Mr. Trevor, who was the head of the music department. And he said, why don't you have a double major? Come on over to the music department. I lasted about a month. I was not suited to learning music theory. All my buddies were in the music department and all the boys I liked were in the music department. So I would have loved to have stayed there. But I just sort of crept quietly back to the dance department once I realized I could not. I learned the things they were trying to teach me. That became apparent very quickly. And I think in the course of my life, I've tried six or seven times to learn music theory. And the last time I tried it, I was 27 years old. I'd already sold four million albums. And I thought, you know, I'm just going to farm this out to