In 1985, at a time when the charts were backed up with pop-rock and daft videos, an altogether quieter presence called Suzanne Vega emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene. She was clearly contrary to most of what was happening and seemed destined for some sort of cult appeal among sensitive souls only. But pop music being the odd animal it is, Vegas's debut album sold quite well and her second, Solitude Standing, sold millions with a fairly strange song called Luka even becoming a top 10 hit.
Her other big song, Tom's Diner, has since had several incarnations, most successfully as the souped up hip-hop version from DNA. In many ways it all seemed a little unlikely - but then Suzanne Vega was never exactly as she seemed. These days, while the actual Tom's Diner is still up there on 112th Street, Vega herself remains very much downtown - forever writing in her notebooks, looking after her daughter Ruby and feeding two confused cats by the names of Ratzo and Cow.
"New York is the creative centre of where I am. There are things about New York that I really love and things that drive me nuts - but I suppose that's why it's attractive. Mostly I just like looking at everybody and seeing who is around. There's always that fine line here between all hell breaking loose and that other side of the city that has a good sense of community. "When I walk down Manhattan I can look at someone and know their circumstances and I find it very provocative and stimulating - riding the buses, riding the subways, walking around and looking at what people are wearing and doing. "Any time I go outside of the city, it really takes me a while to adjust my eyes as it were. I could never write about nature. It gets me excited to read about it, but if I go out into the nature I think it's just a bunch of trees."
Growing up in Spanish Harlem, it was her stepfather, the novelist Ed Vega, who first encouraged a love of reading and writing. Seeing him at work inspired an early affection for the written word - and for the young Suzanne, books rather than music was the real passion. Majoring in English at Columbia University and now with her own collected writings published in the US, she is still very much in love with the written word - and even the thought of it. She confesses too, that she is actually more thrilled at seeing her name on the spine of a book than on the cover of a CD.
"I started to read when I was about three. I guess I must have started writing things when I was just a bit older than that. I had a very active imagination and I took pleasure in putting it down in some way that I could remember what I thought. I liked thinking and I liked being in my own world - something I was constantly reprimanded for! "Besides that, I had three younger brothers and sisters and it was my job to entertain them. So that was ideal in a sense because I could tell them anything. I'd drag them off to a room and do puppet shows for them and tell them stories and they were a sort of a captive audience - and a difficult one too. If I wasn't engaging them, they would leave the room."
Growing up in 1960s New York and singing with Pete Seeger as a child, it was perhaps inevitable that music would somehow take hold of her creative side. The New York she grew up in was perhaps at its most potent, with figures such as Bob Dylan beginning to alert the literary minded to the possibilities of song. It was also a time where music had an added political clout and this too was attractive to the young singer. Eagerly, she immersed herself in Dylan and, largely because of the song Suzanne, she also took to Leonard Cohen in a big way. Other important discoveries were singers such as Laura Nyro and, of course, those writers such as Lou Reed and John Cale who are now almost synonymous with the city.
"I used to run into John Cale at the gym of all places! That's the kind of gym it was - a very weird intellectual gym where you'd find Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, John Cale and Joe Jackson - none of whom look like they could lift a weight at all. It was a very downtown kind of gym. But it's New York itself that is the huge presence - not any of these individuals.
"Everybody draws their energy and their style from it and it's kind of give and take. Yes, if you think about Lou Reed, you think about New York but the city is a much bigger presence than any one person. The city is like a puzzle that you can never leave alone because it can never be done."
Most of Vega's work has come directly from her experiences of her native city. But given New York's many evident distractions, from sidewalk to gymnasium, there are those obvious difficulties in clearing any kind of space in order to think and work. For Vega however, the answer is to be constantly armed with a notebook - and she goes nowhere without it.
"I find that ideas come to me as I'm in transit. That's where you get the germ of an idea - a title or a verse or a chorus. You jot it down and after five months of doing that you can go back and carve some time for yourself.
"With the last album what I had to do was actually schedule it. At that point my daughter was about two and a half and I could actually snatch two hours between four and six in the afternoon. I had rented a sublet in my old building and I would go there. Sometimes I would just sleep because I was exhausted - but it worked. Of course I prefer to do it the way I did when I was a teenager - when it was easy to withdraw into my own world. As an adult and as a mother, it's much harder to do that. But it's really no good just to lock yourself up in your room and write about your own thoughts."
When Suzanne Vega was first heard on this side of the Atlantic, she seemed like a fragile and quiet being. She was understandably adopted and loved by the sort of music fans who themselves wore dark clothes and wrote the odd poem. She seemed calm, controlled, precise, smart and yet, despite the brains and the lyricism, a sort of comfortable presence. Whatever truth there might have been in this perception, everything has since been well rattled by the arrival of baby Ruby. And having recently split from her husband, the record producer Mitchell Froom, Vega admits that it was very difficult indeed to be a mother, a wife and an artist.
"I was always proud of being smart. As a kid I was always smart. But as a mother, nobody really gives a damn - especially your kid. In my situation, the wife part of it fell away and I couldn't do it any more. And with the mothering thing, with little human beings, you have to really make an effort to get in there and get involved and it gives you access to other parts of yourself as a person.
" I find that I'm much more spontaneous now and that I have to feel things with my heart. So I would like to think that it all informs your creativity and that somehow there's a different sort of warmth or understanding of people that might come out."
Suzanne Vega plays HQ in Dublin on June 7th and 8th