It was really June 1988 before I could just sit down and take my breath because I'd been moving for two and a half years almost non-stop. I started to notice that there was all this stuff about Tracy Chapman and suddenly there's a lot of girls coming out and a lot of them seemed to stick my name to it. They said, "Well, Suzanne Vega opened the door" and I'm siting there going, "I did?" So it was a short-lived feeling of being up on the peak for a minute. To watch Tracy Chapman's success was really stunning because she'd opened for me in some seedy little club in New Hampshire. Six months after that she was on the cover of Rolling Stone; her rise was spectacular and her sales were equally spectacular, whereas I think mine were still considered fairly alternative. She was really made into a symbol because she's a woman, she's black, she's political; she was just really thrown into the den.
When people said to me, "Do you feel that you opened the door for these other women?", I had assumed that they were open and I was just walking through like everyone else, like Chrissie Hynde had done, like Joan Armatrading, like Joni Mitchell, like Rickie Lee Jones. I was aware that every one of these women had their own kind of talent and were probably doing that stuff since they were born and so they certainly weren't doing it thanks to me and I felt that having my name shoved in their faces was probably going to make them feel resentful towards me and that worried me, because I didn't like the idea of being the one held up as an example to be thrown rocks at. I didn't want to be remembered for having opened the door for other people; I wanted to be known for my own talent, my own nature, and for my own idiosyncrasies, and my own strengths.
In the beginning, ninety-nine questions out of a hundred were, "So, you're obviously influenced by Joni Mitchell." And I hadn't been. And it started to make me mad! But I think what's happening now is that there are so many women, that people are starting to make distinctions between them. I find that much more positive than jamming two women together in a closet and expecting them to sit comfortably together. Some days I was relieved, it was like, Tracy Chapman is taking the mantle of folk symbol. And I would also have the inevitable jealous feelings of "Why does she get all the attention?" but I found that those feelings weren't useful for anything and to get myself out of that feling I would just work. I bought Tracy Chapman's record, and Michelle Shocked's record and Tanita Tikaram's record and I listened to them and I would figure out what I liked and what I didn't like. That was a way of keeping it all in perspective. In the end I find it very peculiar that someone as different as Tracy Chapman and someone like Juliana Hatfield can both be compared to me and the two of them are completely different. At this point, it's all sunk down now and I feel I have some perspective on it.
I don't feel this thing of, "I don't like women"; I like them, I want to get to know them, especially when they're doing cool things and expressing themselves in a man's world, because it's hard to do that. If you have any sense of compassion you have to get over that thing of wanting to be in the spotlight all the time and have it only on you. Because you're in the same boat as everyone else, whether you like it or not. You have to slug it out like everybody else. That's why I think it's good that you have so many different women coming up now. Because each one is able to stand in her own light and be admired for her individual strengths.
There was all the pressure of that crazy year of 1987, all the fallout and so in '89 we were struggling to match up to what we'd done before and to surpass it. Also, to be surprising because I didn't want to make a record of ten socially-conscious songs with the acoustic guitar at the heart of it. I wanted to be challenging and I wanted to surprise people who thought they had me pegged. I think I did, even though ["Days of Open Hand"] didn't have nearly the effect that I had hoped that it would. In a lot of places, it just seemed like no one ever knew that it was out and some of that was because the record company had gone through tremendous upheaval. And, I have this very stubborn streak occasionally; I say, "I know the right thing and I'm going to stick to it and to hell with you!" So that's the state of mind I was in. I probably could have done with a little more guidance but I think it was something that no one who was close to me felt that they could tell me. And they were right because I wouldn't have listened to them. So we then went on this ten-month world tour which was very difficult. The economy had taken a turn, my record company president had gone, I had a different A and R person who also left during that year. So, the company was falling apart, it was this ten-month endless odyssey all over the world, in a very different climate than the one three years before. I felt that I had taken a left turn and somehow it seemed so far left, that I was out of the ballpark.
I felt that one of the things that was wrong with the album was that, first of all, it didn't have enough contrast in it. It's too slow and careful and there's not enough spontaneity in it, even though I think it was a good job considering the pressure we were under and the conditions we were under. There's a lot of stuff I liked about the album but I decided for "99.9F" that I would go for wild extremes, that I would draw with a big fat crayon instead of little tiny pencil strokes. I wanted something that would be really startling and really direct and kind of cut through all of the ambience that I felt that people were starting to surround me with.
[Producer, Mitchell Froom] said something about revealing me to be the mutant that I really am, which is a funny comment but also very accurate because he just felt that to go the pure folk route wasn't going to work. So we put together these twelve songs with wildly different contrasts and textures and that was the first time that it really felt right to me, that I wasn't imitating someone, that I wasn't being less than what I really was. Because a lot of times on-stage I would feel that I was presenting myself to be a fraction of what I really could be, and that if I'd meet people face to face, they'd always say, "Oh, she's not at all what we expected, she's not shy and introspective and glum." So it was the first time that I really felt my true personality starting to come through.
I've gotten better at saying what it is that I want. Instead of just saying, "Well, I don't hear any edge", I'm able to say, "Let's turn this sound up, or get rid of that noise, or let's turn this fader up or... there's no high end." You learn to say the words that correspond to the specific things.
When I first saw myself on television, or when I kept being confronted with these pictures of myself I felt annoyed because I felt that that had nothing to do with what my character was, and is. Because I feel that my character is very different from the way my face is or the way that I'm caricatured. I can understand why Sinead O'Connor would shave her head because you want to fight against that. I'm not creating an image. This is something that took me a long time to figure out; women have a bigger problem than men because women have to speak in that language of images and men are less likely to have to do that. If you look at Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, both of them are iconoclastic, both of them go for that seedy elegance kind of look; they'll wear suits but they'll look like they've been sleeping in them. They can fit in anywhere. Whereas a woman doesn't have that same neutrality. A woman is either like a sex queen or a book-worm or something. I'd like to find that middle ground for a woman also, where you can be sexy, if you want to be, but you don't have to... I would like to have that way into the world that those men have where they can sit on a train and they're not hassled by anybody.
If you're going to stand on the stage, then you'd better give a show, and that was something that was hard for me to learn. You can't get on-stage and be pissed off because people are staring at you; if you don't want them staring at you, get off! If you get on-stage and cry, that's terrible, because then you're the amusement and if you're crying in front of a hundred thousand people, it becomes part of the act and that's horrible. I've had dreams where I try to sit in the audience and the spotlight keeps coming back at me and I go, "No, stop, I'm watching the stage" and I'm saying, "Well, it's not a very good show because there's nobody there." It also makes me realise that I've chosen to be there.
Touring, there is tremendous pressure: you have to look good and be coherent and do the phoners [interviews] and worry about the ticket sales and figure out how to deal with that unruly heckler in the fourth row, and keep the rest of the audience interested, how to keep the band happy, how to keep the energy alive on-stage, how to keep your clothes clean and looking really good. And, figuring out which anecdotes to tell on-stage; figuring out the right lighting guy, firing someone if it goes wrong and always worrying about how the tickets are going to go, whether you're going to be able to break even in the end - whether it's all worth it! Sometimes I hate it, and sometimes I really love it. It's the challenge of it that keeps me going because it is exciting, especially when you can make it yield something, and make it work.
It's not a normal way to live, although I've been pretty happy with the way I am able to walk around and go shopping. I slide around as if I'm anonymous but occasionally, something will happen and I'll realise that people are watching me. If you're reading a book and someone comes up, demanding something, it can be kind of a pain but I find for the most part, it's easy for me to blend into wherever I am. I don't look for attention and so I don't get it. Even if people know who I am, they don't come up. There are some days when I walk down the street and it's like I have a sign over my head and people are going, "Oh, look, it's Suzanne Vega." And there are other days when I can't get into my own gigs, or if I try to get into a club, my sister will walk through and they'll stop me and go, "Yes, can I help you?" It's not something I can turn on and off; the light bulb comes on of its own free will sometimes.
My grandmother played in a lot of different bands and she played the vaudeville circuit in America. She was a drummer. My father, when I finally met him in '87, sent me all of these pictures of this woman at the drum-kit; she was in her twenties or thirties. My grandmother gave up my father for adoption and had put these three kids in an institution and carried on with her career. It was shocking to me, to come off the road in 1987 and have my father say to me, "Well your grandmother was a musician on the road also." It was a complete circle that I was not expecting at all, because I thought I was being all independent and unique. Music and the travelling seems to come through the bloodline.
Submitted by Sharon Jennings
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