Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Koppelman. Thanks for listening. I'm a little freaked out because my guest today is Suzanne Vega whose work has meant just an extraordinary amount to me over the course of my life and

the 19 year old version of me would be losing his mind over this.

So Suzanne, thanks for being here.

Oh, you're welcome.

Thank you.

No, this is where I want to start, which is last night I put on your first album for the first time probably

in maybe 15 years where I put it on just to listen to it again in a focused way and I was it destroyed me and it destroyed me and it brought me it just

brought me back to my I was a finishing my freshman year of college when it came out and

I knew every group I mean I really literally literally the old usage of literally wore the grooves out on the album and

you know I tweeted about it last night Suzanne and I and I

tweeted that I went back to this record and that undertow, like when I heard undertow, and it just reminded me of being this kid who was much more innocent than you were. You were six years older than me or something, but I was a Long Island kid you were a city person and I was at college and it was like I remember just staring at the lyrics and trying to understand everything that you meant and it gave me a window into like a world

that one day I might be able to live and I tweeted it and then all these fucking

people my age and between my age and yours basically all started saying the same thing about what that album meant and you know I looked and that album sold quarter million copies over all this time and obviously the next album was this huge worldwide smash.

And I know the first album was huge in England and stuff.

But it occurred to me that for the people who bought that album here,

you became this figure in our lives and your music became a sort of

North Star in a certain way.

And I'm wondering what it felt like for you to make that kind of an immediate bond with this group of people?

Hmm. What did it feel like?

It was awesome. I remember the week it came out.

I knew that the record company had pretty low expectations so by their standards they thought that we would sell 30,000 I guess in the U.S.

And so it came out in the first week it sold 17,000, which was like more than half of what they had expected.

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