Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on Explaining Her Songs to Audiences)

“I’ve had my moments where I’ve maybe blurted out more than I intended to, but most of the time if I don’t talk to the audience then it becomes a very uncomfortable show. My songs are kinda dense, and a lot of the time people wouldn’t know what I was talking about. So I learned that it’s better to tell them a bit about it. Not all the songs are my own particular stories, so it’s not like I’m having some sort of cathartic experience when I sing them.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in Henry Yates, “Welcome Back… Suzanne Vega,” Classic Rock Magazine, February 2006

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on the Creation of ‘Tom’s Diner’)

“I had just been in Tom's, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a song called 'Tom's Diner' about alienation, where you're not connected to anything you see. Lately on the Internet I've been reading people saying this song is really random and it's about nothing. It’s not about nothing! It’s about something! Every single scene has been set up to show that this person is alienated from life in general.”—Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega quoted in David Honigman, “The Life of a Song: ‘Tom’s Diner,’” The Financial Times, Feb. 1-2, 2020

Vega and I were on Morningside Heights—she at Barnard, me across Broadway at Columbia—in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and were both even English majors (or to be exact, in my case, English-History double-major). 

But we never bumped into each other, in no small part because I was a commuter. Only seldom did I venture down to the corner of 112^th Street and Broadway where Tom’s was located.

Since then, of course, this eatery has become a worldwide landmark, in no small part due to its exterior being featured in numerous episodes of Seinfeld. Maybe for that reason, it occurs to me, some listeners might feel that, as the sitcom is “a show about nothing,” everything associated with its locales might be, too. 

I’m glad to see that Vega is trying to put that notion to rest.

Song Lyric of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on ‘Some Kind of Trouble’ With ‘Luka’)

“If you hear something late at night

Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight

Just don't ask me what it was.”— Suzanne Vega, "Luka," from Solitude Standing (1987)

The singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega might have been born 55 years ago yesterday in Santa Monica, Calif., but she is far more associated with the city where she grew up, went to college, and set one of her most famous songs, “Tom’s Diner”—i.e., New York. Even “Luka” seems more a product of East Coast alienation than the sunny West Coast.

In fact, she saw a child by that name outside her apartment building. Thin, sensitive, he also seemed like he could be a tough kid. Above all, he “seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children,” so she grafted a history onto him to explain why he seemed so set apart: the abuse he suffered at the hands of a parent.

“Luka” works through ambiguity and implication. Start with the child’s name: it’s probably, but not necessarily, a boy’s. He could come from a number of countries.

Nowhere does the boy, the song’s narrator (itself an act of creative daring), come right out and state that he has been hit. But he keeps coming close. The second verse, the one quoted above, observes that “Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight” might be observed; later, he thinks he might be “clumsy” or “crazy,” as if blaming himself for the trouble; and the last verse notes that “they only hit until you cry,” with the “you” the thinnest linguistic veneer that it could be someone else, except himself, being hit.

Earlier in the song, “you” is used more conventionally, yet subversively. “I live on the second floor,” Luka says, “I live upstairs from you.” This is more than a child meeting an adult in the song; “you” is now the listener who might find an example of child abuse right where he or she lives. "You" is implicated now in what is told: What are "you" going to do about the suspected violence?

In a transcript for the show “The Infinite Mind,” Vega related how, while performing the song at an Albany, NY appearance on behalf of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, she was startled by the sight of a crying woman in the audience. It wasn’t until after the show that she could identify the woman: Hedda Nussbaum, the abused partner of Joel Steinberg—the man who had killed their adopted daughter, Lisa Steinberg, in one of the most heinous instances of domestic violence of the last few decades.

(For more about Vega--specifically, her song "Caramel"--please see this prior post of mine.)

Quote of the Day (Suzanne Vega, on Her Song “Caramel”)

“It’s a mixture of my own experience and feelings, things I know to be true, and fantasy. A worse but more interesting life. If I had given into that temptation, there would have been chaos and pandemonium.”—Suzanne Vega, on her song “Caramel,” quoted in David Honigmann, “Girl-Power,” The Financial Times, June 12, 2010

As a Columbia alum who had occasion to visit the famed Morningside Heights eatery, I’ve felt a curious identification with Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” And her “Luka” compels my interest for its emotionally wrenching narrative by a child-abuse victim.

But for the witching rhythms that can transport you far beyond anything you’ve ever known, only one song can do: “Caramel.” It offers simple but spellbinding songcraft about the allure and dangers of desire. (“I know your name/I know your skin/I know the way/These things begin.”)

It’s a minor disappointment of my life that I never got to hear Ms. Vega when we were both students on Morningside Heights—me at Columbia, she across the street at Barnard. It would have been something to catch this artist when she was in the process of finding her voice.

Last weekend, Ms. Vega trace her life's trajectory—including how she came to write “Caramel”-in an interview with The Financial Times. It comes at a particularly fascinating moment in her career: an attempt to take hold of her financial future, now that the whole recording industry has gone kerflooey because of the digital revolution.

Specifically, the singer-songwriter, according to a New Yorker profile a few months ago, is taking a leaf from Dar Williams and Carly Simon by re-recording a number of her old songs (starting this past week, with Love Songs), with new arrangements, then releasing the product independently. It's a way of reviving her back catalogue as the major labels let them go out of print.

How will this turn out? That remains to be seen.

I bought Carly Simon’s attempt at this, Never Been Gone, just as I have most of her albums. The results of these largely new acoustic arrangements were spotty—from great successes to misconceived experiments.

More fundamentally, however, fans—make that, in this more cold-blooded age, “musical consumers”—are likely going to be reluctant to accept the same old wine in different bottles.

Right now in the music industry, I don’t think it helps to discourage artists such as Ms. Vega from doing what they can to survive. True “heritage artists” such as James Taylor and Carole King have such rich songbooks—and such devoted followings across generations—that, no matter how few units they might sell these days, their live performances will still attract capacity crowds. Other artists, not quite as well-established, such as Ms. Vega, don’t have that luxury, and so need all the help they can get—including innovative ways of promoting their backlists.