Anton Sanko has played keyboards with Suzanne Vega for the last two years. Interviewed towards the end of the *Solitude Standing* world tour, he spoke about his development from being a promising classical guitarist to a session keyboardist and then member of the Suzanne Vega Band...

I was originally into art and I always wanted to be an artist. I had a younger brother who, I guess when I was about thirteen, also got really into art and he was really good. I was good, but he was really a lot better so I decided that I had to try some other kind of outlet. There was a guitar class forming in my high school so I bought a $9 guitar and I went for it.

I had gotten to the stage where I was preparing to do a Carnegie Hall recital with six months to prepare, but I said 'I don't really know if I'm cut out for it' because it's a really hard lifestyle being a classical musician; I like playing, but it's impossible to make a living that way unless you're really really great and I wasn't prepared to dedicate my life to it.

I started playing keyboards when I was nineteen. I wasn't interested in keyboards, I was interested in synthesizers; I always wanted to have a guitar synth-that was my ideal thing-but the technology was not good. My goal was to be the Keith Emmerson of guitar; Keith was my idol, my hero. I studied classical guitar to be like him on the guitar, so the next step was guitar synthesis.

I went to New York University and they had this big old synthesizer from the 50's and I started fooling around with it and really got into it. Not long after that I bought a Korg synthesizer but it was feeble so next I bought a prophet 5, then everyone was hiring me because I had one of the first and I knew how to play it.

*What were the first groups you played in, what sort of music?*

Around that time I was really interested in bands that were R'n'B and funk, but synthesizer funk. I played with that band Our Daughter's Wedding, so I was involved with a lot of early all-synthesizer bands.

I had my own band for a while where I played both guitar and keyboards which was really unusual-it was like atonal funk, really weird.

I did sessions for a long time, commercials and stuff, but mostly sound effects: the sound of diamonds shooting through space or a watch going across the universe! When I was in NYU they had a Fairlight and I started getting really into that. I grew along with the synthesizer lab there. I was a kind of Fairlight specialist. Then I did this thing with Kashif with the Synclavier.

*Was it at that stage that you first became involved with Suzanne's band?*

Yes, I first became involved through the Synclavier. I had a partner who worked up in Atlantic Studios and he said there was some girl called Suzanne Vega coming to do some overdubs. I had no idea who she was, but Lenny Kaye was producing it and I knew him really well because this band I used to be in called Shox Lumania, his wife was one of the singers. I'd known Lenny for almost ten years. On *Undertow* there's a Synclavier guitar part that Steve Addabbo plays. C.P. Roth did most of the synthesizers on the first album and he's also a really good friend of mine. They asked him if he wanted to do the tour, but he's heavily into sessions so he didn't want to go and he asked me if I was interested. I really wanted to go so I called everyone I knew that was associated with it. For some reason it didn't come through and they had this other guy for the tour, Peter Zale. So there was Mike Visceglia, Jon Gordon, Peter and Suzanne; no drummer but then later Sue Evans came in. Peter was with them maybe six months and I came in after that.

I'd been good friends with Mike since I played in a band called Your Real Parents with him. He talked about Suzanne when we were doing Your Real Parents, and I heard they weren't happy with the keyboard player so I kept grilling him until he said that they were looking for someone, and I called Lenny, who gave me Steve Addabbo's number. I called Steve and went over to his house and he played me the record-which I'd never heard before-and I was floored. I was so affected on so many levels; lyrically, harmonically, everything-I was blown away. After that I really wanted the job. I was going after another job simultaneously with a much bigger band, but that just didn't affect me as much as Suzanne's work. A few days later, Steve Addabbo gave me a tape of *Luka* with just Suzanne on vocals and guitar, and asked me to come up with parts for an audition in the little studio at his house about three days later.

Suzanne was there, with Mike and Steve, and they started playing the first part to *Luka*, which was different than now, and I came in with what is now the new start. Suzanne was shocked, she stopped playing. They must have been impressed, because the next day they gave me a tape of *Straight Lines* with no synthesizers on it, and asked me to come up with some parts.

Anyway I came up with my own parts for *Straight Lines* and a couple of days later I got a call to say that I'd got it. I was extremely happy. I was taking a pay cut from what I was getting by half to do the first tour, but I didn't really care because I was so tired of playing this other music that I couldn't stand.

My first gig with Suzanne was at Smith's College in Massachusetts. That was a pretty big hall, about 2500 seats; Suzanne has always been really popular in that area. I was in shock then because we'd play the first line of, say, *Small Blue Thing*, and the audience would roar and go totally nuts, and then listen in silence. In a lot of bands I've played in, you make a mistake in concert and it goes almost unnoticed, but this music was more stark: everybody formed a vital part of the sound, so if you made a mistake people would lean over to each other and say so.

*Did you enjoy that tour?*

Yes, apart from when our tour bus blew up. That was terrible. I lost a really cool guitar in that-a '62 Strat. The other thing was that I was expecting them to thank me and say goodbye at the end of the tour. I was so sure of that I was actually looking for another job. After the tour though, they said they were shooting the video for *Left of Center* and asked if I wanted to be in it; I was really surprised, and really happy.

*How important is the audience reaction to you?*

Very important. It doesn't affect my playing but it affects me emotionally and if the audience is really excited, we all get jazzed up and there's more adrenalin.

*Do you find that you write things and decide 'This is going to Suzanne and this is for my other project'?*

Well it was like that for a while, but Suzanne constantly surprises me. I always liked the band Scritti Politti-I had some stuff in the Scritti vein, but in my own way, for my own project. I never thought Suzanne would be interested but yesterday she asked me for the tape and was dancing round her room listening to it and she said 'I have so many ideas from this tape.' You see the cool thing about working with Suzanne is you can go in any direction, come up with anything, and she can accept it because she has such a broad base to start from.

*How do the things you co-write with the rest of the group emerge?*

Well, I'll give you an example: *Solitude*. Suzanne sat down one day and said 'I have this idea for a riff' and played the pattern; almost immediately Mike and Steve started playing on the upbeat and I played the first thing that came to mind that I thought would fit in there, and the whole thing came together really fast. This was in the rehearsal room three days before we were due to go into the studio, and the rest of the album was pretty much written. It was almost frightening how quickly it came together!

*Caspar Hauser* was a little bit different because Suzanne had been fooling around with the idea for a long time, but it didn't seem cohesive at all. We had the verse and a sort of chorus but we didn't have a bridge at all, so Steve came up with the idea of adding a tribal 'Peter Gabriel' feel to the thing, and the Gabriel influence inspired me to be more adventurous in my choice of synthesizer textures. Suzanne and I came up with a sort of bridge for the 'alive' section, so we recorded Steve's drum part and arranged it very roughly as we went along. Then we moved the whole session to New York to do mostly keyboard overdubs and some vocals for two and a half weeks or so. On the last day everyone was on at me to come up with something, I had a vague idea in my mind about what the bridge was supposed to sound like because we were all listening to a lot of Bulgarian vocal music at the time! It wasn't really together, so I finally went and sat in another room while they were doing some other parts on another song, and I sat down at a piano and started playing the chord changes with the left hand and I worked out these harmonies with my right hand. I came back and said to Suzanne 'Sing this note' and I played the part and then 'Sing the next note' and I did the next part and so on all the way through, and then I said 'Sing this melody on top of it' and that was it. It was one of the most frantic parts of the whole thing but it came out really nice after that.

*Do you find it difficult to reproduce that track live?*

The only hard part is that one section. I don't know how it sounds in the house, but I was told it comes off really well. I like to turn it up in that bit, not so much that it's overbearing but I stick my head in the speakers because I like the way it sounds. It always gets a good response, it's a good performance piece, I guess.

*How did Ironbound come about?*

We were fooling about with that for a long time-this is when we were still working with Jon Gordon-and had the verse section, but it wasn't really going anywhere. Suzanne and I went to Jon's house where he had a small studio; we had the first part of *Ironbound* and another song *In the Flat Field* which never came out anywhere, and she wanted to do a guitar and vocal demo over there at Jon's house, so I went over there because I was very good friends with Jon Gordon for a really long time. We were sitting around and she gave me the tape of *Ironbound* and *Flat Field* and I really liked *Ironbound* so I went to work on it. I thought of the way Suzanne played guitar and of the sort of thing she would like to play as a bridge; not really as mind-bearing as coming up with a bridge for *Caspar Hauser*!

*What was your contribution to Night Vision?*

I came up with the whole guitar thing. On the record Suzanne played steel string and I played classical. We did some pre-production at her house in Cape Cod; she had shown me the poem and I thought it was really cool. I thought the first part of the song was unbelievable, it was really good harmonically and the way the chords moved and everything, and I really wanted to work on it. I just played it over and over-I was playing this one chord progression for the couple of days we were up there, it fit perfectly.

*Would you like to play guitar on that song in concert?*

I thought about it but I really like the keyboard part too and so I haven't been able to resolve that dilemma in my mind yet. Hopefully on the next tour I will be doing some. I've been thinking about how I'm going to integrate it. I feel close to some kind of solution: what I really need is a good guitar controller. When we were working up in Bearsville, I had the Synthaxe which I borrowed to see if I liked it and I was not happy with it for a couple of reasons. I've tried everything that's there, but I'm still looking for the right instrument. Also I think the Synthaxe is very imposing looking, I don't think it fits in with the look of Suzanne's set-it looks like you're playing a vacuum cleaner! If I had something that was very subtle that would be great.

One of the things I thought of when I wanted to play guitar on a couple more tunes was using a sequencer, but just for little things. Using it just to fill out sounds a little that's O.K.; on the other hand to use a sequencer for everything-I hate that.

*Was it your idea to add the sequencer to In The Eye, because the original version was very different, wasn't it?*

Well, when we did it at first we weren't happy with the 'feel' at all. Suzanne was really into the *Rumblefish* soundtrack by Stuart Copeland and I really wanted to do something like that on the verse; it's full of percussion samples but really in his unique style of playing. I had an idea for a sequencer part but I wasn't exactly sure what it was. I was still working it out when Steve Ferrara came down to my studio, and he contributed the left hand of the sequencer part.

A couple of times it's not worked on stage and I've had to play it-it's not hard for me to play. I like the feel of it there, it's very urgent and I think the song is very urgent. When I use my hands it sounds pretty much the same but it's not as mechanical, which I want.

*When you go back to the States are you going to start working on your own material again?*

Well, my brother, who also decided he wanted to become a musician-he's bass player with the Lounge Lizards-has been working on his own project, and we played in a few bands together. I have a tape of my own material which I was shopping around, but it's getting like I have more input since we did the co-writing on the last album and we're already talking about new material, so I'm happy pursuing that, and my brother also wants me to write with him. I was also thinking about doing some solo concerts with just guitar and synthesizer when I get back home, because I've been asked to do some things like Dance Theater Workshop, which is experimental music, but I don't know.

*Finally, I would like to know, what is your favourite sandwich filling?*

My what?!! I haven't had a sandwich in so long. I have to say tuna fish because that's the only thing I can think of; when we go into the gig that's the one thing there's piles of backstage, so we all make tuna fish sandwiches. When I get home I would usually have fresh turkey meat with melted cheese on top of it... dark turkey meat on wholewheat bread-there's a sandwich for you!!

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