The following pages contain four different contributions from readers concerning different aspects of the role of Vega's music in their life.

We really appreciate these contributions and therefore we will try to stimulate your creativity with another competition: In the next issue of Language, which will be publiced about six weeks after the release of the new album, we "strongly urge" you to write your own reviews and send them in. All reviews will be published and the most original one will be rewarded with a "glittering prize".

TEN YEARS OF SUZANNE...

Last week I went to see Simply Red in concert. Singer Mick Hucknall said that that particular concert was a sort ofanniversary, because it had been ten years since it all started for them, "and I feel so oooollld..." Could you imagine Suzanne Vega bending forward, pretending towalk with a walking stick and saying "I feel so oooollld"? I can't. And yet I realised that indeed, it had been ten years since Simply Red's debut album knocked Suzanne's debut off the Number One spot she had held in my own personal Top 30 for a whole 11 weeks. Ah, those early days of October 1985 when I first heard Suzanne. 'Marlene on the wall' was being played on the radio, and I let it go unnoticed at first, until suddenly I _heard_ the song and thought "Hey, I like that!" The next week a dj said that her debut album would be played on the midnight album show, and I stayed awake, with my clock-radio/tape deck stand-by next to my bed. And so I heard 'Knight Moves', 'The Queen and the Soldier', and I heard 'Small Blue Thing'. I could picture it in my mind as I lay in bed: "with my knees against my mouth/I am perfectly round", and I fell in love with her music.

I found out she would open up for John Cale in Utrecht, on 20 October 1985, and I bought tickets. I'd never done anything like that - go to see somebody in concert that I didn't know anything about, I had only heard those four songs, she wasn't the main act and the album wasn't even available in the shops yet. As you can tell, I was the only one in the audience who came to see the support act rather than John Cale (though he was impressive live as well), and when she started with 'Tom's Diner' people just kept on talking, and I admired her for her courage to go on. It's still my favourite concert of Suzanne's, I liked the intimate setting in the small concert hall, and I liked the way she kept re-tuning her guitar as if she didn't know what else to do on stage... But most of all I liked her stories, about 'Calypso', about 'Left of Center'...

Needless to say I ran to the music shop as soon as the album was available. Suzanne's music changed my musical live. Until I heard her I used to listen to melodic new wave rock, and looking back I feel that until then I never realised that lyrics in songs could actually tell you something, create images in your mind. Oh yes, I knew that Kate Bush' 'The Kick Inside' still did it for me, even after seven, and there was an occasional song that would struck me, but they were exceptions. And never in a way as personal as Suzanne's lyrics struck me. "Wondering where the hell/I have been"... And I loved the way the music supported her lyrics. Suzanne was different.

The images kept coming, 'Solitude standing', 'Pilgrimage', 'In Liverpool'... every album brought new pictures. The music kept changing, growing, and even though I'm still not overly fond of the 'industrial' sound on '99.9Fø' the music suits the lyrics once again.

Since I heard Suzanne I became interested in other female singer/songwriters, and she put me in a direction where I found a whole load of interesting music, mostly women, who create their own music, share their stories, their observations, make you think about life, about living, about living your own life.

Thank you Suzanne!

Marion Kippers

THE LONG VOYAGE

My fondest and earliest memories of Suzanne are of my junior year in highschool with my best friend. While driving the streets of Tampa, the songs of Suzanne were never far away. And that was the summer of 1987. I never realized what a big part of my life Suzanne would become, and neither had I realized that Suzanne was here to stay.

Suzanne arrived into my mucical world among the Beatles and 10,000 Maniacs, and after recovering from the new-wave explosion of the 80s which gave rise to such groups as the Cure and Depeche Mode. I believe I first heard Suzanne off the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack; I imagine that many of her fans would consider themselves "Left of center". Then "Luka" became a hit, and my journey with Suzanne began. I soon purchased "Solitude Standing", and "Suzanne Vega", listening to each song in solitude and with reflection. At the time I didn't know as much about Suzanne's life as I do know. I wondered where she got her inspiration and if her lyrics came from actual experiences.

In college I remained loyal to Suzanne by also religiously listening to "Days of open Hand" and then "99.9Fø". By then I was also very sure about my music, therefore at least a couple of Suzanne's songs were always featured on any musical complilations I sent to friends (I was always secretly trying to convert them to listen to my kind of music).

And here I am now in the winter of 1995 sitting in my office listening to "Do you love any, do you love none do you love many, can you love one do you love me?"

Even after all these years Suzanne Vega is still the most articulate and profound songstress and songwriter. I tried to find others but none were comparable. I went through my stages of listening to Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, the Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, Sara McLachlan, and even Shawn Colvin (who is a close second), and they are all very good. But Suzanne Vega still stands alone, sometimes as Marlene or Calypso or just "the neighborhood girl".

Farha Ternikar

JOURNEY

There she is, a girl in a wide flat land
all alone
Now she moves, yet not sure,
changing her direction all the time.

But look, a big white house is waiting for her
see this tiny little hand in a window
waving hello.
She's arrived, she's at home
in her love hotel.

Andreas Wolz

SUZANNE VEGA AND THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT

A few months ago I was preparing a term-paper about Leonora Carrington, a surrealist painter and writer who might be best known for her romance with Max Ernst in the early 1940s. And while I had a close look at the strange and dreamlike paintings of hers I felt the same intense and rather inexplicable feeling I have when I listen to Suzanne's music. There seemed to be something true and honest about these paintings and although the pictures showed rather confusing and bewildering scenes they felt quite familiar to me.

Looking at some of them I thought: Well, this might be the result when one tries to paint "Small Blue Thing" or "Fat Man and Dancing Girl". While I was reading more about Carrington, I was reminded of Suzanne from time to time. There are in fact some parallels in the work of both women.

Carrington uses a lot of mythical characters and symbols. Witches and creatures half human half beast appear frequently. Now, there aren't that many mythical references in Suzanne's work, she uses much more urban images. (Not surprising since she grew up in New York, probably the most urban place on the whole planet.)

But still there are similar images. The white horse for example, which is Carrington's most important symbol of freedom and strength and a sort of alter-ego, appears in some of Suzanne's songs, too. In "Wooden Horse" it serves as an alter-ego for Caspar and in "The Silver Lady" the character finally manages to break free on the back of her horse. There are other "fantastic" characters in Suzanne's songs which I can imagine finding in a Carrington painting. "The Wind Fairies" for example which "come at the Wind Queen's each and every call" or Solitude who stands by the window, her palm split with a flower, with a flame.

Carrington's dark humour reminded me very much of Suzanne's, and Carrington's habit of referring to nursery rhymes such as Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (Little Francis home from school
Swung the baby by his tool:
Mother screamed, Auntie shuddered,
Father muttered, "I'll be buggered!"
Nanny said, "Naughty Francis!
You've ruined Baby's future chances.")
reminded me of that "Wallaby Song" Suzanne used to sing in the schoolyard and during the 99.9F_ tour. ("I called the doctor
and the doctor said
I've got a pain in my stomach
Because my baby's dead.")
But most remarkable is the statement Carrington once made in an interview: "We are all different me's."

At once Suzanne's "You are the outside of an inside like mine" sprang to my mind. The similarity of those statements may be rooted in the fact that both women are Buddhists. But there were more traces of Surrealism in Suzanne's work. When I was looking through a variety of books about women and the Surrealist movement, I stumbled over a picture which showed two hands holding a dice pinned to a surface covered with numbers. It was the "Surrealist Object" by Valentine Hugo.

I thought: Wait! I have seen this before and I got out my Days of Open Hand cover and was stunned by the similarities. Looking through other books I found various pictures by Chirico or objects by Marcel Duchamp in which hands and gloves play a big part. Confused I asked my literature professor whether she thought this was an accident or quotation. And she advised me to check out the work of Joseph Cornell. Now, watching his Dadaist/Surrealist objects I really thought I had the Days of Open Hand cover in front of me.

Thumbing through the pages I came across an object called "Even before we met I knew you were out there somewhere" which I thought could have been a line written by Suzanne. Then I recently looked through old Language issues and by accident (or was it the Surrealist hasard objectif????) my look fell on the SongTalk interview: "I love the artwork on your newest album [Days of Open Hand]. It reminded me of those great boxes by Joseph Cornell." "Yeah, I wanted it to look like that. The whole idea of putting things into boxes and different contexts was interesting to me."

And in an interview with the German magazine Musik Express/Sounds from June 1990 Suzanne says: "I had the feeling that the purely narrative structures were too restricted. I wanted to write more surrealistic, to put more feeling into my lyrics. So I got rid of the narrator and waited for the effect you get when you just have the images left. So my lyrics don't make a lot of sense in the reality. Only in the dream, in the dreamworld of the song the intention of the words can be seen." The intention of the words and the difficulties to deal with language is a common theme in Suzanne's songs. Now, there is a German writer called Unica Zrn who was associated with the Surrealist movement and who struggled like Suzanne to deal with language, to discover the hidden meaning, the "realms underneath, never touched, never stirred." She tried to explore the magic and the strength of language by decomposing and rearranging words like in the old alchemist tradition. She cut them into their single letters to arrange them to new words, anagrams. Now, this is actually what Suzanne does with some of the key words in the Days of Open Hand artwork. They are shown as a loose combination of letters, some of them falling apart even. Another image which is used frequently in the work of Unica Zrn and Suzanne is the image of the knife. (Perhaps as one of the most important tools of the writer to cut the words to discover their actual meaning??) "A knife is better than a friend" Unica Zrn wrote and Suzanne refers to it in a number of songs like in "Undertow", "Feather and Bone", not to mention the Knife Pendant.

Zrn was married to the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, who might be best known for his work with dolls which he arranged with their limbs at odds. So I was all the more stunned when I opened my copy of "Urgent Whispers" and it was full of photos of dolls, blindfolded and with white horses and with twisted legs.

Well, summing up possible links to the Surrealists, one should certainly not forget "Night Vision", which was inspired by the poem "Juan Gris" (a Dadaist/Surrealist painter) by Paul Eluard, who was probably the most important Surrealist writer. And then there is of course Suzanne's former boy-friend "a Dadaist painter from Liverpool" whom she met in 1978 and for whom she wrote "Gypsy" and whom she most probably had in mind when she was writing "In Liverpool". Well, maybe working on my term paper made me suffer under a severe fit of Surrealist paranoia, but there seem to be certain Surrealist aspects in the work of Suzanne Vega. Sure I'm not saying that she is a Surrealist artist or that she shares the aesthetic and social ideas of the Surrealists. (No one would state that Sylvia Plath is a Surrealist artist, either, just because her poem "The Disquieting Muses" refers to the painting by Cirico with the same title.)

It is always hard to tell in how far an artist is actually influenced by phenomena as the Surrealism and unfortunately discussing such a problem very soon leads into the realm of speculation. (I'm not even sure that Suzanne knows Zrn or Carrington, as the work of both women is unfortunately hardly known.) So in how far Suzanne is involved with the theories and ideas of the Surrealist Movement is not for me to judge and we will probably never find out. This is of course only unless she lets us know in the next issue of Language.

Philipp Hofmann

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