Philip Bradley meets up with Suzanne Vega on the German leg of her European tour and finds out that she is not as much of a sauerkraut as her music leads us to believe.

"I'm not used to seeing the people I play to. I normally play in large dark auditoriums filled with lots of smoke."

Suzanne Vega takes a bow in front of a hugely enthusiastic, if somewhat too visible, audience. She's now well into the first leg of her world tour taking in most of Europe and of course the very shores of Old Blighty. Today, through, she's hitting a thousand or so Germans in Stadtpark, Hamburg, with a steady supply of hit material -- Luka, Solitude Standing, Marlene On the Wall and the new single Book of Dreams -- that some have merely dismissed as sensitive CD music.

But like the sun that warms the cold damp ground left by a night of torrential rain, Suzanne Vega is slowly coming out from behind that big dark cloud, clutching a collection of more peaceable, if not downright chirpy little numbers from her new album, Days of Open Hand.

After the success of her debut album, and the even bigger success of her second, Solitude Standing, Ms. Vega has forsaken her acoustic Folk roots (although, not entirely) for a more high-tech glossy finish. She's also taken the rather, dare I say it, Rock'n'Roll step of forming a band. A nucleus of ANTON SANKO (Co-producer, Keyboards), MICHAEL VISCEGLIA (Bass), MARK SHULMAN (Guitar), FRANK VILARDI (Drums) has catapulted the 32 year old singer into territories she'd surely never dreamed of entering. Indeed, the former solo acoustic artist who played the New York Folk scene in Greenwich Village is even credited on the new album with Fairlight programming!

So what's the story, Suzanne?

"In the beginning I would have been happy with just a guy beating on a pot with a spoon, just someone who wouldn't freak me out," says a smiling Vega at her apres gig Hotel. "I'm not a schooled musician and sometimes if you play with someone good they'll be somewhat condescending because they think you don't really know what you're talking about. I think the reason I've ended up with such good musicians is because my music has a very wide range. There are some songs that are really delicate and require an almost orchestral way of thinking about it. Then there are other songs that are really loud and you really have to hit the drums and you have to be able to play simply but strongly. The musicians who've stuck with me are the ones who can play both ranges.

"I decided in the beginning that I didn't want to work with session musicians," she continues. "Because those are the guys who come in, size you up and give you what they think you want to hear. I wanted someone who had an emotional investment in the music...I can remember listening to the first album and telling Lenny Kaye (producer) that it didn't sound like a band. And the reason it didn't sound like a band was because it wasn't a band...I thought I better fix the situation and get one. Mike's now been with me five years, Anton's been with me about four, Mark's been with me three and Frank joined last year..."

Book of Dreams

Once a suitable collective of musicians were gathered together, a successor to the critically acclaimed Solitude Standing LP was what was required. Although the method was a little roundabout, as co-producer, Anton Sanko explains.

"We did festivals over the summer, so already we knew the parts for songs like Men In A War and Pilgrimage, about five songs in all. Straight after these festivals we went in and recorded.

"Most of Pilgrimage was done before going into the studio. I'd got it all on sequencer. And a lot of the stuff we'd toured with. We would do guide everything at once. Frank would be in the room, Mike in the control room, I'd have a rough keyboard line, Suzanne would have a mike in the control room, Mike would have his guitar direct into the board. Frank would play with a click and we'd just play along with Frank. He'd have a very light mix of the other guys and a very loud mix of himself and a Frank. Just for structure. All my stuff went on the last two days of recording."

Once the basic tracks were laid down, the band realized there was not enough material for a whole album. Consequently Vega and Sanko packed their bags and headed for the Vega residence in Cape Cod to write more material. "I read a lot and that got me writing in my notebook and ideas would come from that," smiles Suzanne. "Or I'd listen to some of my favorite artists, you know, like ELVIS COSTELLO and that might get me going. I start to respond to how he feels...It's more I'm sitting listening to the song and I start to hum it and suddenly my own string of words start to line themselves up. Actually, most people wouldn't say it sounds like Elvis Costello, they would say it sounds like Suzanne. But for some reason listening to his music gets me thinking about songs."

"When I wrote Tired of Sleeping I found that to sing it made me feel like crying a lot. I couldn't listen to it without crying. Now I can listen to it and sing it without crying, so I've got more used to it.

"Men In A War is a song about being stoic and enduring great paing. I guest I write a lot about soldiers and battles. The battle thing is just what life was about. Everybody has their sphere. Elvis Costello has this kind of love/hate relationship to the world, JONI MITCHELL sings about her lovers, and I guess mine is this battle of getting up int he morning and doing what you have to do. As well as the physical thing; at home my parents would fight, my brothers and sisters would fight, at school people would fight, in the street, everybody was fighting."

Anton Sanko again..."Pilgrimage was a thing that I'd been fooling around with for a long time just with my computers. I played it to her and she really liked the feel of it. We took the basic idea and she would develop it from there. We would just divide it up into sections...Each one was different. Pilgrimage was unusual in that there was already an existing piece of music. That was all very synthesisery, you know cutting and pasting.

"A total opposite example would be something like Off The Street where she had the melody and the words and everything was all done. She was singing it to men and I kind of roughed out what the chord changes would be. That was more of an arrangement...For a long time we would just play the two of us, just guitar and vocal and it would grow.

"With Book Of Dreams, Suzanne had everything except that it was only two sections. A lot of the things that I do with her she has an A and B section and it needs a bridge. That's the most common situation."

Productive Minds

After another spell in rehearsal with the band, Vega and her entourage returned to what Sanko terms the 'big studio', in effect New York's Skyline. Here, Sanko and Vega took up their joint production roles. It was the first time that either of them had undertaken such a project and naturally, both were a little apprehensive.

Suzanne: "I think the reason I felt confident in doing it, and I don't think I'd have done it otherwise, is because I've been working with the bank for quite a while and I felt confident of their ability to put the basic bones of the song into an appropriate musical setting. I trusted their instincts.

"How we normally did it was we'd get together in a rehearsal room and I'd play them a few things or I'd make a rough tape and bring it in and Anton would play it with them and then we'd starting jamming on it. We'd make tapes all day long. At night I'd go and listen to them and that's where the objectivity comes in, 'cos you'd go home and listen to the tape and you'd think 'Oh the tempo's wrong or that's wrong'...You'd go in the next day and try some different things and make more tapes and go and listen to them again that night...You have to listen to what you're doing."

Anton Sanko agrees and adds: "I was very nervous up until the time we got into the studio because I'd never been the co-producer of a project of this magnitude. I was worried about things like the SMPTE not locking up. Not really things that a producer has to worry about that much, but I didn't know that at the time.

"There's a lot of flipping between being the producer and the musician for me. The label was a little bit nervous about having me and Suzanne co-produce, so they wanted to have an engineer who they felt strong about. They got a guy called PATRICK MCCARTHY who was from Windmill Lane, Dublin.

"What I was really worried about was the voice. I wanted to make sure the vocals were on a consistency with the previous albums. That's the thing that the average listener responds to first and that's the most critical thing to your average listener. A voice is such a subjective thing and I was very nervous about that.

"I don't know what microphones they used on the first album but I know what they used on the second album, it was a Sanken 41. We fooled around with that and tons of other ones on this, and I'm still not sure we found the perfect one. We ended up using an old Neumann valve, a U67."

Dub Time

The basic recordings took around two weeks, recording on average, one track per day. Sanko again retired from the studio and along with Vega began to work on the overdubs, a task that was to take about three months to complete.

"All those months of overdubs we did at home," he laughs. "At that time we didn't have anything; just a big sound proofed room. No equipment. We rented stuff from a company call F&L. They have a remote truck and the guy come over and just took all the stuff out of the truck and into the apaprtment. It's the same stuff as U2 used to record in that castle. It breaks down into flight cases and you can take it anywhere. In a few hours everything was up and working. It was a Sound Workshop desk but we only used the board for tape returns and monitoring. We didn't record anything through it, so it worked great. Just a few reverbs for monitoring.

"We recorded everything through a Demeter mike pre-amp so we didn't have to record through the console. When you are recording a mike in a studio they have to go through the console 'cos they have to be brought up to a certain level. That's one of the things that makes most recording consoles so expensive 'cos they have a mike pre-amp. Patrick McCarthy tole me about this guy called MIKE DEMETER who makes these tube pre-amps; two spaces high and a big knob on it that says 'Volume'. You plug the microphone into it, and plug it straight into the tape machine. It can work as a DI for guitars as well. We used that for almost everything --except when it came tot he drums because you need a lot of them and a Demeter can only take two inputs at a time. Usually some kind of EQ as well, like a couple of times we used a Neve. It's very clean not using the console and that's how we maintained quality."

And it was at home too, that Suzanne first got to grips with the might Fairlight (she is credited with Fairlight on a track from the new album called Rusted Pipe).

"I'd been listening to KATE BUSH's albums and PETER GABRIEL's albums and I really loved them," she explains. "I guess I had my own fantasy of getting a Fairlight and being able to conjure up all these wonderful atmospheres. I found instead that what I still preferred was the acoustic sounds on the Fairlight. I like the Acoustic Guitar, I like the Cello. I don't think I have the concentration to stick with it. But I did learn some things Seeing the notes on the keyboard made it easier to see some things, like melody. You know, how you shape a melody. How you change it from major to minor and still make it work.

What kind of rhythms...

"I guess I wrote the Dun, De Dun, Dun bit on Rusted Pipe although Anton did the choruses and a lot of the other arrangements -- he takes much more naturally to the Fairlight than I do."

During the mixing stage Suzanne and Anton brought in the recognized talents of English producer, HUGH PADGHAM. He liked the rough mixes and they had already done, and kept closely to their original feel.

Anton: "Hugh kept asking JEFF KEEENE (engineer) who'd done all the mixes, what kind of reverb he was using on the vocal. Most of the time it was this S300 reverb called a Lexicon LXP1. Hugh was really into low tech things. He liked to set up a space for Suzanne's voice that'll remain constant for the whole record. He'd pretty much use the same present for the whole of the record. I think it's a really good idea cos it gives the listener a continuity."

The resulting product, entitled Days of Open Hand, is a neat picture of a more content sounding Suzanne Vega. The acoustic sensitivity is still there but it has been placed into a broader, more diverse musical setting. The first single, Book Of Dreams sounds like the sort of song XTC might have written during a celebratory night on hallucinogenics. Happy daze again, Suzanne?

"Yeah, I thought it was a more positive album, partly because I think as an artist you don't want to repeat yourself...When I've written songs for about 15 years, I find I'm really attracted tot he tragic ending, where the guy dies or something. I know how to write that kind of song really well. but you can't do a whole show of that.

"You need contrast. If you are a really good songwriter like ELVIS COSTELLO you can write tragic songs, you can write funny ones, love songs, hate songs...I feel as an artist you need to stretch yourself. The funny thing is I found people complaining about my happier moments. They don't like it. They prefer the sadder ones..."

Anton Sanko -- Keyboards

For the past couple of tours I've been using a KX88 as my main controller. I'm not wild about it but there aren't many other options. I use that into a MEP4 which has four outputs and when you call up a number on the KX** it changes the number on the MEP4 and that simultaneously changes the sound on all synthesizers. It also sets up different zones on the keyboards. It works okay, but it's only got four outputs and I've got five synths.

"Underneath that I've got the Akai S1000 sampler; I have six megabytes of RAM in there now. That's really good 'cos I have the whoe set in there, I don't have to load anything anymore. It was really expensive to do but we can change the set list now. Previously, I had an S900 and that was a real hassle. I have the Voyetra module and the Sequential Circuits VS. Then I have my old S900 on the bottom 'cos I needed something to be a piano module that was happening so I ended up using the S900 again.

"I have a really big mixer made by a company called Spec. It's a dedicated keyboard mixer and it's really good for keyboard players 'cos it was everything you'd want in a mixer. As well as a good clean sound across the board, it was very hard to find a keyboard mixer that you control the overall output level with a volume pedal. A lot of them you can't do that without strapping something across the output which is not cool. It also has eight effects sends per channels which is really good and lots of little things like click returns."

Frank Vilardi -- Drums

"I have a five piece kit of Pearl drums. Two snare drums; a Noble and Cooley piccolo is the main one and then on the side there's a 1930s vintage slingerland. The piccolo is pretty snappy but it's made out of wood and I can get a pretty deep sound out of it. I find it great for Suzanne's gigs 'cos it cuts through but it doesn't take up a lot of space. I use two snares on a lot of tunes, like Rusted Pipe, and on Institution Green I'm using the main snare as the Snare Off, and the side snare as the Snare On for the military thing. On Men In A War I'm playing both, just doubling the back beats.

"I have a whole mess of Sabian cymbals. I'm using a ride, two crashes, a china and two splashes. The reason I'm using two splashes is just 'cos one is easier to reach with the left hand than the right hand. Also Tambourine, Ice-bell, two high hats, again right side and left side. the heads are all Evans.

"I've got an Akai S1000 sampler to trigger stuff. In Institution Green I'm triggering a gong and some metallic sounds that we whacked up for the record and just sampled off the record. In Solitude Standing I use it for that side stick sound and in Book Of Dreams I trigger this clay drum that sounds like a cowbell kinda thing. I also have a Dallas pad on the right and on the left a Drum Kat which is a much better version of the Octopad. It's much more heavy duty, the pads are much better and the MIDI is better."

Mike Visceglia -- Bass

"I have two basses; a 5-string fretted and a 4-string fretless. Both are made by Fodera, a New York company. I have a small rack system with a mono Carver power amp, Pierce bass pre-amp which has two channels of switchable EQ. One for the fretted and one for the fretless. If I change basses, I can just switch to the next channel.

Also an Alesis Midiverb which I basically just use for a reverb, and I have a pedal board which basically has a TC Chorus, a volume pedal and Boss Octaver which I use on Pilgrimage and a Boss Compressor which also has an A/B switch so I can have both instruments plugged in. I have these SWR cabs which are rated as the new hot American cabinets, as opposed to the Hartke which were the standard before. They are rated at 500 watts per channel. Both basses are active EQ."

Marc Shulman -- Guitar

"I use Pensa Suhr guitars. John Suhr is the in-house luthier at Rudy's Music Stop on 48th Street New York and Rudy Pensa is the owner. He has a real gift for the way they are set up. and they are active EMG pickups. I have the rembolo system blocked off, it's a traditional Fender-styled bridge, but I have them blocked off so it's stabilized. When you have the springs hooked up the the remolo blocked there's a natural reverb and the tension on the strings is better.

I use an MXR Dyna-Comp compressor into a Roland CV-2 chorus until which I use effectively as a Lesley simulator. It's an old analogue unit, and it's very noisy. That goes into a Boss overdrive pedal which is used for Cracking and Pilgrimage. Everything goes into a volume pedal and a pair of James Demeter amplifiers. It was custom made and it's essentially an integrated amp, amp and pre-amp, with an effects loop and an auxiliary slave amp, so it's 75 watts a sie. In the loop I have a Korg A3 multi-fx processor and a Lexicon LX5 reverb, and an open backed 12" Mesa Boogie cabinets.

"I use a tiple, a small 10-string instrument, on Tired Of Sleeping. It's tuned like a guitar except it has a cop on the fifth fret so the highest string is an open A. It's made by Martin and this particular Tiple is about 50 or 60 years old. Fishman transducers made a lovely pickup for the bridge."

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Submitted by Wendy Chapman

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