Songfacts®:

• The first song that Suzanne Vega ever wrote was a Country tune written to her younger brother Matthew. She told American Songwriter magazine: "It was about my brother and how I would always love him even though he got into fights. I liked the song 'Liverpool Lullaby' as sung by Judy Collins and I wanted the song to have that tough tone to it. It took me three years to finish it. I finished it at the age of 14."
• Speaking with the New York Press, Vega described this as a "fake country song." "I started writing songs when I was 14," she said. "The first songs were like fantasy songs. The first song I wrote was a song called 'Brother Mine,' and I was 14, and it was kind of like a fake country song. I've never lived in the country, but I was really into country music for about a couple of months."
  
  "It was like a fantasy of being a country girl getting new shoes for my brother," she continued. "There was this line about I have to go into town and get them Friday night, that sort of thing. We were right in the middle of Manhattan, so… Those were my first songs. They weren't about anything real, they were about this fantastic life of escape. And there were similar songs about running away, traveling, being on the road, which I had never been. Those first songs had a big element of fantasy."
• Just under 40 years after writing the song, it finally found its way onto a record when Vega recorded it for Close Up Vol. 4: Songs Of Family , the fourth of a series of discs where she re-imagines her own songbook in stripped down arrangements.