The small, shy voice of Suzanne Vega has finally found its audience. Steve Turner follows her passage from the New York folk clubs that first launched Bob Dylan.
Suzanne Vega had a feeling and tried to imagine what shape this feeling would have if it had been an object. She imagined it small and blue, like a marble or an eye. She imagined it lost, tumbling and falling. She imagined it fragile, reflective and silent.
She wrote a song about the feeling and called it Small Blue Thing. Now she believes she's tapping into a generation of small blue things - overlooked people, people without a voice. "I write about small images and small things and think I have a protective sense. I feel it towards my audience."
As she says this, sitting in a cold dressing room in Manchester, she draws her knees up to her chin and looks at the wall. She is wearing a black leather coat, a woollen scarf wraps her neck and maroon trousers are tucked into black boots. Her face is delicate, sensitive, thoughtful, as different from her photographs as each photograph is from the other.
"I can remember as a child feeling there was no-one who spoke for me," she says. "In America to be noticed at all you have to be larger than life, cartoon-like. It seems to me that there wasn't anyone writing in a small voice. That's why I'm surprised the album has done as well as it has."
The album, Suzanne Vega, released earlier this year, has now sold over 800,000 copies worldwide. In Britain it's on the way to going platimun. In America it's done respectable, although not chart-denting, business. Her autumn tour of Britain was a sell-out. Tickets in Norwich went in three hours. At her Birmingham concert the audience was out of its seats from the sound of the first chords.
It's unusual music for the times. Anachronistic some might say. Reflective, imagistic, clean, clear, peaceful. Critics are drawing up family trees which see her descended from Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell while showbiz writers are guessing at a"folk revival". Vega, who doesn't believe an acoustic guitar woven through finely wrought lyrics constitutes folk music, is happy to be a small voice on behalf of small people. She's not physically tiny. She's five foot six inches but is, she admits, "small boned". My thumb and first finger easily encircle her wrist. When she turns sideways she almost disappears.
Growing up in Manhattan, where she moved as a child of two, she lived on the fringes of both black and Spanish Harlem. New York with its excess of energy and its lack of ground space, is not an easy place in which to feel big.
"I was dealing with a hostile environment every day," she says. "I'm obviously white and obviously slight, so therefore it was continually threatening. I felt I had to learn to hold my ground and maintain my character under intense pressure. I think that's why the image of the diamond is appealing to me. They're small and tough and endure through anything."
When she was 9 years old she discovered that novelist Ed Vega, the man she'd always known as daddy, was in fact her stepfather. Her mother had married briefly at 18 to Suzanne's real father in Santa Monica, California. The most she can say about it at the moment is that the revelation came as a "surprise", another disturbance in a household characterised by turmoil of one sort or another. But the deeper effects were to shape her music. Here sense of identity had been shaken overnight. Her father was not who she thought he was. She was therefore not who she had thought she was. How many more surprises could be in store? "Suddenly I realised that everything I had thought was stable could in effect be stripped away in a day."
Growing up alongside friends who adored David Bowie and the New York Dolls she remained unmoved by the '70s theatricality and pursuit of the new. She craved something sunk deep into the ground, something reliable and time-tested. "I wanted something that would endure," she remembers. "Maybe it was because my past had a sense of not being steady, of not being sure what was going to come next. It was my attempt to get back to something traditional."
She found what she was looking for in the music of Bob Dylan and, behind him, the songs of Woody Guthrie. She was 14 when Blood On The Tracks was released and reviews which compared his current work with his '60s catalogue intrigued her. She pulled out other cuttings, read Anthony Scaduto's 1971 biography and researched the singer's back pages. She longed to have been around at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan upset folk purists by employing keyboard players Barry Goldberg and Al Kooper along with three members of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. "It seemed to me that singer-songwriters were different to other musicians because they were able to create their own characters. You could re-create your whole world if you wanted to. That's what it seemed Dylan had done and, to a lesser degree, Paul Simon.
"I loved the idea of the solitary wanderer with the guiter re-creating Woody Guthrie. That one person sung something with his unique voice and it affected a whole generation struck me as being... important. It seemed far more important to do that than to do other things."
At 14 she wrote a song about her younger brother's propensity for getting into scraps called Brother Mine. Her second song was The Silver Lady which she still sings if pushed. At 16 she was performing. But it was difficult being Guthrie when you were a small-boned, fair-haired female living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She loved Guthrie's simplicity and timelessness but realised she was deficient in the knowledge of riding the rails, hitting the hobo trail, and the union problems of migrant workers. "So I decided to write my own songs about my own life. I thought I could write about it in a way that would mean something to other people."
At this time she was at the New York High School Of Performing Arts, the institute made famous by Fame, dividing her days equally between academic studies and dancing. Desperately shy and insecure she compensated by being arrogant and standoffish. Already she was on the outside, the small blue thing content to observe, to take notes and store information. "I always wanted attention but yet if anyone looked at me I'd blush and shrink."
Feeling unacknowledged she clammed up. Her words got stuck between her teeth. She found herself either reduced to silence or saying something that bore no relation to her thoughts. The problem lead her to train herself to articulate, to communicate, to find the right phrases for the right feeling. But even now, fluent as she is in both conversation and song, she acknowledges that not everything can be trapped by words. One of her most recent songs, premiered on the British tour, starts with the thought: If language were liquid/It would be rushing in. "It's a song about language and how it's limited and how if it were liquid it would come and fill up all the spaces. As it is it's too solid, not flexible enough. The music is really circular and beautiful and it all comes tumbling in. It's as though the music fills up the spaces the words can't."
Following school she studied English at Columbia University and then launched herself into occupations well below her capabilities - a credit clerk in the advertising department of Crown publishers Inc., a receptionist for a typesetting company. She had little idea of direction but she carried on writing and playing.
Eight years ago, ignorant of the legend of the Velvet Underground, she found herself "accidentally" at a Lou Reed concert. The experience was to catalyse her songwriting. It was the first time she'd heard someone singing about the world outside her front door, a world of sidewalks, violence, alleyways, pimps, junkies and hookers. She saw them as modern folk songs, good stories put to good melodies. "After that I wasn't so sure I wanted to be a traditional folk singer any more."
Out of the experiences she wrote what was to become the first song on her album, Cracking. She'd recently moved out of the family apartment and into a house owned by a woman who, unbeknown to her, was a suicidal alcoholic. The madness seeped into her own consciousness and for a while she too felt on the verge of a crack-up. Cracking was Vega looking at the world through a precariously balanced sanity. "In that song I wanted a purity about the angle of vision right from the opening line, It's a one time thing/It just happens a lot, you know you're dealing with something that doesn't make sense. Before I'd seen Lou Reed I wouldn't have tackled that as subject matter and I wouldn't have presented it in that way."
Around the same time she ventured down to Greenwich Village on a pilgrimage to check out the clubs Scaduto had named in his Dylan biography. One of them, Folk City on West 3rd Street, was to become a regular haunt, the place where Suzanne Vega, singer-songwriter, finally met the world.
It was here in 1983 that Ron Fierstein, a lawyer who at the turn of the '70s had fooled around in a folk-rock outfit trying to blend Procol Harum with Crosby, Stills and Nash, came with his pal, Steve Adabbo, on the recommendation of a mutual friend.
Fierstein and Adabbo had been through University together in the '60s, playing music together in the '70s, and then seen each other get proper jobs - Fierstein with a law practice, Adabbo as a producer/engineer. But they still hankered after the business of promoting, gigging, playing and charting. There was still something left to do.
It was after having decided to find an artist to develop as manager-producers that they were directed to Vega. As Fierstein describes the experience, it was love at first sight. He was "knocked out with her songwriting ability". All she needed, he felt, was a little contemporary embellishment and a lot of guidance. "She'd never played with another musician , she was working as a receptionist and her songs were very bare," he remembered.
The major problem facing Fierstein and Adabbo was the fact that record companies began heaving at the suggestion of signing an artist from a folk club. Most of the major acts associated with the Greenwich Village of the '60s were now making and selling their own records. The promised booms of '79, '81 and '82 hadn't occurred.
Nancy Jeffries, the A & R person from A&M Records who eventually signed Vega, was no exception. Rather than face the prospect of visiting a folk club she at first sent her assistant. When he returned enthusiastic she realised she'd have to go herself. "Finally I grudgingly got myself out of the door and into a folk music show and I was completely blown away," she says today. "I hadn't heard anyone who wrote like that in ages."
"It was the lyrics. It was the way she looked, who she was, the way she carried herself. The folk music thing had put me off but in fact what she was talking about and the kind of person she represented was very, very modern. She represented a female who was very thoughtful, yet sensual. A real woman for the '80s who knew who she was and how to deal with it."
Jeffries believed that all that was needed was to expand beyond the sound of voice and guitar. She called in an old friend, Lenny Kaye, the former rock journalist who'd made his name compiling the Nuggets collection of mid-'60s garage band Psychedelia (1972) and then playing guitar for the Patti Smith Group. Kaye, she felt, would have the right intuition to work with a woman songwriter.
She played Kaye some early demos which he recalls as "folk with a quasi-rock backing". He was not overly impressed. Yet he too ventured to Folk City. "Seeing her live I was really quite entranced, " he confesses. "I began to see that the best way to bring her around was not to make her more rocky but to make her less rocky. My initial thought was to have no drums and to balance acoustic guitars against synthesisers."
Together with Steve Adabbo, Kaye produced three tracks, Knight Moves, Cracking and Undertow, which marked out the musical territory they were to explore on the album. "I was always wondering how we could do things differently, how instead of bringing Suzanne into the mainstream we could extend the mainstream so that it could encompass Suzanne." Kaye, like Jeffries, is struck by Vega's mysterious blend of intelligence and sensuousness. "Her music," he ventures hesitantly, "is erotic in a very... feline way. There are very sensual undercurrents. What I particularly like is her observation. she's very careful with her choice of words. She considers what she does and then tries to fashion from that the exact right phrase or musical note that fits it."
The clincher came with an excitable live review in The New York Times by Stephen Holden. "It put a seal on what we'd done," says Kaye. "That piece finally broke her," agrees Fierstein. "It called her "the Joni Mitchell of the '80s" and a "really original talent". It gave the record companies confidence. David Geffen called me the next day and said, You've got the Joni Mitchell of the '80s and you didn't bring her to me? I had to inform him that his label had already pased on her."
Signing with A&M and being produced by Kaye and Adabbo allowed Vega to become one of those most appealing and important of people - the professional singer-songwriter. But with her there's no carefully designed impression for public consumption, no fake ambiguity and no '60s style message. "My songs are starker than they would have been in 1965," she says. "You don't have the obligatory smile at the end. I have a preference to leave things unresolved, to keep the tension in there." Would she want to affect a generation? "I don't think I will because I'm far too shy about inflicting my world-view on anybody. I describe what I see rather than project an image of the world as it should be. I'm not overtly political in my songs."
To her the '60s rallying calls went unheeded. Aware of Woodstock as a 10-year old she was also aware of Altamont, Watergate and punk, a progression she now views as a slide down from hopes of peace and freedom to experience of violence and antagonism. "To me Altamont was the finger pointing to the '70s," she says. "It was telling us that this was what the future was going to be like."
So what does she see as the value of her own songs? "To move somebody. To make them see some part of their life as being unique in a way they may not have realised before. It touches you. It makes you realise you're not the only person who has felt that way. It makes you feel more connected to other people."
In concert she doesn't move very much herself, or even say very much, but she orchestrates moods. Her audience, in Manchester at least, is young, orderly and polite. They clap hardest both before and after The Queen And The Soldier, the song she says most fans want information on. They request Knight Moves but don't get it. She tells them that it's special for her to be in Manchester because it's Morrissey town.
Vega's songs come at you as showers of images, feelings made concrete. She's always moving, always projecting herself into someone else, or something else to give herself another angle on the world she finds herself on the margins of. She's a poster of Marlene Dietrich, she's a small blue thing, she's an abused child, a hookers's friend.
Marginal people intrigue her. She's exiled because of poetic perception. Others are exiled throught pain, poverty, eccentricity, criminality, ugliness or antisocial behaviour. She tries to reach into them and sing for them. A new song Luka, scheduled for her second album, is the painfully confused cry of a boy who's being beaten by his parents. Calypso was written from the point of view of the woman Odysseus leaves behind him on the remote island of Ogygia to return to his family, who gets but a page in Homer's The Odyssey.
She is the Small Blue Thing, curled up and observant, recording her night-time dreams, reading Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Rilke. I think they know that/I'm looking at them/I think they think I must be/Out of touch, but I'm/Only in the outskirts/And in the fringes/On the edge and/Off the avenue (Left Of Center).
For the past ten years she, along with the rest of her family (two brothers, one sister), have become adherents of the Nichiren Shoshu school of Buddhism, chanting for fifteen minutes twice a day. "It's very practical," she says. "If you don't know what to do about a situation and you chant, the answer comes out of your life. It's a law, like gravity. There's something almost infallible about it."
Although she doesn't sing about Buddhism she admits to chanting about her writing. "It's the only way I know how to dig down deep beyond where your mind works." Fierstein thinks the circular nature of some of her songs is informed by the musical structure of chanting. Kaye says, "The closer you get to the creative spark, the closer you get to mystical experience. The thing in me as a producer that Suzanne possibly responds to is that I can tap into that spirituality. I can understand it, let it flow through me and put it back out again."
Suzanne Vega is not all seriousness and self analysis. Her weightiest observations are often sandwiched between chuckles, and she responds well to teasing. She introduces Undertow with its opening lines of I believe right now if I could/I would swallow you whole by saying, "I had to take my younger brother aside recently and inform him that this song was nothing to do with cannabalism or oral sex." When she leaves the stage at the end of each of her encores it's with the skip of a lamb.
There's no grand Vega plan. Fierstein says he just wants her to be happy, "to have the opportunity to do her thing." She auditioned for two recent movies, Desperately Seeking Susan and The Colour Of Money, and he can see her acting in the future. He'd also like to see her work on a musical with his brother, the recently celebrated playwright Harvey Fierstein, of Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage Aux Folles fame.
Jeffries, now A & R at Virgin in Los Angeles, thinks the time is approaching when America will take to Vega as Europe already has. She cites the signing of Peter Case to Geffen and the success of Paul Simon's Graceland as indications of a loosening up, a willingness to explore.
"People are interested in hearing something intelligent again," she says. "The political climate in America has been conservative for quite a few years so right now it's not unlike the close of the '50s when folk music and introspective lyrics were popular because people had become so repressed and had no way to express themselves."
Collaborations with other musicians such as Johnny Marr and Sting have been discussed but then abandoned through schedule problems. Vega though remains a staunch Smiths fan and would be curious to meet Morrissey. It's in her appreciation of Morrissey that she comes closest to describing herself. "He's funny and he's definitely eccentric," she says. "I think it takes a lot of courage in this day and age to be unashamedly eccentric when everyone is trying to be normal and glamorous and larger than life."
Submitted by Sharon Jennings
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