Suzanne Vega

"I can't listen to Days of Open Hand without feeling like I'm getting hives. It was such a difficult album to make, I was doing it under such pressure. I can feel myself getting weird as soon as I hear it," says Suzanne Vega, sitting in a downbeat café near her Soho apartment in New York, reassessing earlier albums. Although the recent release of her fifth, Nine Objects of Desire, marks 12 years in the business ("or 22, if you count the 10 years before I got a record deal"), she is sanguine about her success, claiming in her quietly precise way that at 37 she has just started to scratch the surface of "what I'm capable of".