"All the mysteries of life come in A minor," Suzanne Vega said, curled up on a couch in Hollywood. It was a statement she first made to the guys in her band who were urging her to use more chords in her songs. Not wanting to "antagonize" them, she's been working to stretch her songs lately, harmonically and melodically, despite her faith in the omnipotence of A minor. It's a struggle that she's come up against frequently, wanting to write the songs that move her, that express the mysteries of life as she sees it, but still wanting to please other people. "I'd like to be a poet," she said with a smile, "as long as I still get to mingle in society."
When she was on tour in Texas, she shocked a record company executive by telling her she wanted to go shopping. "I'm so glad you're a regular girl!" the lady said happily. From Suzanne's sometimes somber image and serious songs, people wrongly assume she doesn't indulge in life's lighter pleasures. She admitted to drinking a milkshake right before walking over, and even to eating meat on occasion. "I have a reputation for being pacifistic, vegetarian, Buddhist, and frail," she said, smiling, "and it's not like that at all."
She wanted to be an artist since she was a kid, and studied dance at New York's High School for the Performing Arts. She soon realized, though, that it was the music and not the movement that mattered most to er, and refocused her energies on being a musician. "I started to realize it was the music that made me want to dance," she said. "The whole day depended on what the pianist was playing. And I got along with the guys who played piano better than anyone. All my instincts were moving me towards music, even though all my training was in dance. When I was 17 I gave up dance for good."
From the very beginning, songwriting was not something she took lightly, spending three years writing her first song. She was inspired by artists like Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, both by their music and by the spirit they represented. "These people had a very mystic significance to society. It wasn't that they were just pop stars. They had an almost religious responsibility...I wanted to be one of these people who had that responsibility. I wanted to join them."
Her first effort in that direction was written for her brother Matthew and called "Brother Mine," and began with the line "Sonny boy, you need new sneakers, I guess we'd better go into town and get them Friday night." She taught herself to play the guitar by learning the chords to songs in sixties songbooks, such as "The Girl From Ipanema."
But when people asked her to sing out loud, she would shrink with terror, an experience that almost kept her from music permanently. "I just wilted. 'Sing out loud, are you crazy?' I was very shy and with- drawn. I couldn't do it. These big guys with their big stomachs singing, 'Barbara Allen.' I wasn't into it."
But she couldn't deny the thrill she felt singing into a microphone for the first time, an experience she described as "intoxicating." She realized that she could sing as softly as she liked and still be heard, and it was a style of delivery that suited her songs. After a few years of failing to get any gigs, in time she fell in with the crowd at Folk City in New York's Greenwich Village and began performing regularly.
Hearing Lou Reed transformed her ideas about Songwriting: "I started feeling I could be experimental. You could write a song with no chorus or melody. All the restraints were off." Besides writing songs, she spent a lot of time thinking about her image, and devoutly documenting the minutiae of her performances. "I had this little notebook where I would enter in where I played," she recalled, "the name of the gig, the songs I played, how I did my hair, what I was wearing, how many people were in the audience, what the response was, how much money I made. I had a mailing list, and I would design the flyers. And I liked all of that, all the business-like aspects of that."
In time she realized that music mattered more than all other concerns and she devoted all of her energy to singing and songwriting. She sang her songs in a gentle, unforced manner, wanting to capture the easy spirit of children spontaneously making up songs. She relased her first album in 1985, called Suzanne Vega. It was one of the most warmly received records of that year, featuring powerful, poetic songs like "Marlene On The Wall" and "Freeze Tag" and pristine, acoustic-based production. The sound of the album was gently wrapped around the voice and guitar, warmly and elegantly supporting the songs without overwhelming them. It wasn't, however, the sound that she had in mind, as she explains in the following conversation.
Though much criticial attention was garnered on her first album, it was a song from her second album called "Luka" that really introduced her to the world. She had written it years before but didn't feel it was ready to record. A dark song with a light, even happy melody, "Luka" managed to touch on child abuse in the gentlest way possible, written from the perspective of a child who has learned to not say too much. Like one of Randy Newman's character songs, it's powerful for what is left unsaid. The song became a Top Five hit and Suzanne an artist known the world over.
Having such enormous commercial success with such an uncommercial theme made life confusing for her. When a song like "Luka" becomes a hit, what does one write next? "You start to think that you have some control over this," she said. "You write 'Luka' and it becomes a hit, and you think, 'Maybe I could make a living at this.'"
At about the same time that album was released, an English dance group called DNA released a bootleg remix of "Tom's Diner," the opening and closing song from her second album. This version added a mighty dance rhythm under what was originally an a capella vocal, and the contrast of the two jived brilliantly. When Suzanne first heard it, she said she wasn't sure whether DNA should be sued or congratulated. She chose the latter, and her record company, A&M, officially released the record along with other bootleg recordings of the same song that started to emerge, sung in many tongues and styles, from German disco to Jamaican reggae.
If any song was less commercial than "Luka," it would have to be "Tom's Diner." She said, "After 'Tom's Diner' and the freak thing that happened with that, I just thought, 'I give up. I'm not even gonna try anymore. I'm just gonna do what feels right.'"
What felt right was to write the songs that wanted to be written, ambitious works such as "Men In A War," which revolves around the idea of a phantom limb, and "Predictions," a lexicon of fortune telling techniques. She also wrote one called "Book of Dreams" which, unlike Jack Kerouac's book of the same title, is not a collection of dreams that have passed, but dreams of the future. "Yes, the future," she said, "things to come. That was a theme I found emerging from a lot of my songs. Songs... about leaving the past..." These songs became the foundation for her third album, Days Of Open Hand.
We met up with her months after the release of Days of Open Hand. She was in the midst of thinking about her next move, and wanting to musically expand her writing. We spoke for a long time, during which she delved deeply into her ideas about being a songwriter, and how to be selective about the voices one listens to during the rush of creation. Afterwards we took a walk down Hollywood Boulevard, a constant circus of manic humanity that she took in pensively from behind rose-colored shades, slipping quickly and easily through the throng.
SongTalk: Bob Dylan said poets don't drive cars. You don't drive, do you?
Suzanne Vega: [Laughs] Well, that's because I grew up in New York City where you don't really need one. Although I was considering today maybe I should learn. Yeah. For a sense of freedom.
ST: Do you think of yourself as a poet?
SV: That's always a tricky question because I love poetry and I would love for my songs to be as poetry. But the word 'poetry' has all these strange connotations of preciousness and aloofness. I love words and I love what they do and I love poetry. I'd like to be a poet.
I get my inspirations from things that are very ordinary and not precious at all, like children's nursery rhymes, and games that kids play in the street. Things that I had played as a child; sing-song rhymes and rhythms that you make up to amuse yourself while you're jumping rope, or if you're teasing sombody else. To me it's all one and the same. As a child we had things that we played, and that's where I first got a sense of words, what they were about.
But I also use other things. Medical textbooks, science textbooks. Pieces of information. Wherever I can get information. Whatever rings true to me is where I'll find it.
ST: Your songs are often very ambitious, sometimes concerning something quite abstract, such as "Small Blue Thing." Do you ever find that you can't put across an idea in a song?
SV: It depends how you go for it. I usually don't start out with the idea of being abstract. I usually, honestly, try to be as simple and clear and as straight-forward as I can. A lot of people say [laughs], "Oh yeah? Why don't you just say what you mean?" I honestly am trying to say what I mean, it's just that the things I'm writing tend to be really dense. I think, because of my childhood experiences, that my perspective is
somewhat unusual, maybe. So I'm coming at it from a different perspective. So to me, "Today I am a small blue thing" is a very straight-forward statement. Whereas other people are saying, "If she loves the guy, why doesn't she just say so?"
Sometimes I pull it off and I'll sing them for a while and they just won't hit the mark for me. To me, "Cracking" really hit the nail on the head. "Small Blue Thing" hit the nail on the head, and "Luka" hit the nail on the head. But other ones didn't. "Marlene On The Wall" always seemed a little wide of mark, somehow.
ST: That's surprising to hear, because it's such a great song.
SV: [Laughs] Well, it's accessible and people do like it, but for me, personally, inside myself, I feel I had something in mind, and I kind of did it, it was stylish, it was interesting, but I didn't feel it was quite the bulls-eye that some of the others were.
The idea of using a poster as a reference point is a very pop idea. It's a song about Marlene Dietrich. You kind of get that from it, or it's a song about a relationship. As opposed to "Today I am a small blue thing" in which some people think I'm speaking in code, or it's a riddle they have to break. It's more like "Let's pretend," like a kid's game. If you were a small blue thing, what would you be? Well, you'd be like a marble or an eye. It's pretty straight-forward.
ST: It's a straight-forward way of expressing a feeling. But that's something people don't often manage to express in songs--
SV: [Laughter] I love songwriting. To me, there's all these elements that are mixed into it, of magic, spells and prayers... as I said before, children's games... science... I like to bring all these things together so it's all one. You can draw from any source.
ST: Your song "Predictions" lists things with which you can tell fortunes, and some of them I've never heard of, yet they have a magical resonance.
SV: To me they did, also. That's why I left the song the way it was. Some people don't like it because it's inconclusive: "What happens? Nothing happens. It's a list. How can she sit there and sing a list? I don't like it." [Laughs] But to me, just the images as they are, are fine. That's what it is. There's nothing wrong with it. Each image has its own beautiful space.
ST: Do you have literal meanings for all those images?
SV: In my mind, they were all clear. I was looking up a word in the thesaurus, and these were listed in the footnotes of a certain section. Each one of those has its own name, some kind of 'ology' goes along with it. Telling the future by mice. There's a name for that. [Laughs] Telling the future by dice has its own name, and by ashes and by the rays of the sun... But there was something about the way that it was listed.
I rearranged it. I didn't use all of them. I only used the ones that had that special resonance to me. Then I rearranged it so it would sing right.
People go, "Well, what's the fortune at the end? She doesn't give the fortune." But that's not the point of the song.
Again, that was an experiement. I don't know that I would sing that for the rest of my life.
ST: That song is similar to a poem in that one needs to know the title to understand it. Do you write songs as poems, finishing the lyric first before working on music?
SV: I'm still working on that. I wouldn't say that I have one set way of working. It's usually that it comes together. Usually I have an idea. With "Cracking" I knew that the title came first, and after that I would try different lines and it just wasn't working, and sometimes it will take months for the thing to line up correctly until it seems to fall right in the right place.
"Luka" was that way, also. It takes months of kind of fingering it in my mind, while I'm walking around or doing something else, it's just like a problem that my mind goes back to. It wiggles. It's like you're trying to get the right angle, and once the angle comes, I can write the song in two hours. Like "Luka" took two hours. It took months of thinking about it and lining up the shot, in a sense. Like if you're playing pool and you want to clear the table, you line it all up, and then you just hit it and everything clears. It's very satisfying, but it takes months of preparation.
ST: With "Luka," you had a character in mind?
SV: Yes, but I wasn't sure what the character would say. I knew what the character's problem was, but I didn't know how to get the listener involved. I wanted it to be from the point of view of a person who is abused. Now the problem that that person has is that they can't say it. So how do you get the problem out if you can't say it? How do you involve the listener? Well, you introduce yourself: "My name is Luka." And "I live on the second floor, I live upstairs from you," and so therefore you're engaging the listener. "I think you've seen me before," so you start to listen. You're drawing the listener into this world with very simple, basic information. And it then proceeds to state the problem without ever saying what the problem is. That was my problem as a songwriter: How do I give this information without ever giving it?
It's easy to point a finger. It's easy to say, "Child abuse must stop" and everybody knows this.
ST: So much tension is created with the line "just don't ask me what it was," that this person is holding a lot inside, and doesn't want to talk about it.
SV: Or can't talk about it.
ST: It's a technique that Randy Newman often uses, though few others do, of using a character to make a point by what he doesn't say.
SV: Yeah. The listener has to work a lot. It's true. There's no getting around that. [Laughs]
ST: Was Randy Newman an influence on your writing?
SV: For a long time, one of my favorite songs was "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today" because it's not sentimental at all. There's so much feeling in it; he just gives you certain images. It's a very moving song, but it's not sentimental. I think I was aware of a few other songs, but that one, I remember feeling that I'd like to write like that.
ST: I was thinking more of his character songs. Not a lot of songwriters write in character, as you did in "Luka."
SV: I guess I got that idea from studying poetry, and from T.S. Eliot. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." If you just read it flat, it doesn't make any sense. When you realize that this character is revealing information, then "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" makes sense if you look at it through his eyes. Whereas if you just read it flat as a poem, it just seems to just lie there, it doesn't really do anything. And once I realized that, I started thinking about how you could use that, like a camera. So it was something I was playing with.
ST: Are there other poets besides Eliot who have influenced you?
SV: I'd say Sylvia Plath because of the way she uses language, the way she puts words together. She uses language almost sculpturally. She'll pick words for what they sound like as well as what they mean. That was very impressive to me. It seems to pack more into it. It's almost like code.
And, of course, Dylan.
ST: You think of him as a poet?
SV: The way that he used his images. To me they work as well on the page as when you listen to them.
I don't mind being a poet as long as I get to mingle in society. I don't like this idea that to be a poet you have to be aloof and you can't walk in the street. Poetry should be part of living. Everything should be all mixed together.
On one of the tours I was down in Texas and the woman from the record company said to me, "What would you like to do?" because we had an afternoon off, and I said, "Let's go shopping." And she goes, "Oh, I'm so relieved to find you're a regular girl. I thought that you were a poet. I thought you'd be no fun, that you'd sit in your room and look out the window." She was relieved.
I think, yes, I probably am a poet, but I really feel the need to be among people and to watch them and talk to them and be on a regular basis.
ST: Do you get a lot of song ideas from observing people?
SV: A lot of people say I'm very observational, but I'm really much more involved than I pretend. These are not just clinical observations about people. There is a direct connection between me and the person that I am writing about. There was a boy named Luka but he was not abused. He's probably shocked to death that I put him in this song.
[In] the things that I'm writing about, I'm revealing some facet of my own life. It's something that I've seen or been involved with. It's not just a question of reading a paper and saying, "That's a good topic. I think I'll write a Gulf War song." That to me is too academic. I think, in order for it to ring true, you have to know what you're talking about. It's not enough just to look and say, "This is what I deduce." You have to be involved.
ST: Do songs gain more resonance if they are true?
SV: I think so, yeah. To me it's really important that a snog be true because you have to stand on stage every night and sing it.
And you have to force people to listen to it. And if it's not true, they're not going to want to listen to it. You can fool yourself for a while, but after a while you will lose the urge to sing it because it won't have any resonance anymore.
ST: So with a song like "Marlene On The Wall," you actually had a poster of Marlene Dietrich on your wall?
SV: Yeah. Oh, that was a truthful song. The lines came out of my life. But you want to be careful, too, because you don't want to get into "Oh, my boyfriend left me..." I have a problem with specifically confessional songwriting. I think you have to craft it in some way. I don't think you can come on stage and blurt out your innermost feelings. My niece can blurt out her innermost feelings. She's four years old. I wouldn't want to pay $25 [laughs] to go see her do that. You need to put it in a form. Although it is truthful, you have to give it some respect, or a certain kind of dignity, by putting it into a kind of form. Because these people are not my friends. They're paying to see a show, some form of entertainment. So I'm not gonna sit there and talk to them like Ronee Blakely in Nashville. [Laughter]
I had breakfast with Leonard Cohen once and I asked him, "What do you think of confessional songwriting? Is it better to be confessional or not confessional?" He said, "You do whatever you have to do to make the song work. Whether it's confess or lie or make it up." And that makes sense because that's what his songs are. Some of them are confessional; some of them you're sure that he's lying. [Laughs]
ST: I understand that he is extremely business-like about his song- writing; he carries a briefcase and works constantly on his songs every day. Is this how you approach your songs?
SV: I find that I do work on it everyday but it's in my mind. I find that it's more like a problem that's unsolved. My mind will wander back to it if I'm in a good frame of mind. I'll say, "Well, that last line just isn't working" or "That just doesn't seem to be the right thing," so my mind will wander back to it, but it's not the formal thing of sitting with a briefcase and working on my lyrics.
ST: Do you mean that your mind keeps working on songs even when you're doing other activities?
SV: Yeah. Usually when I'm walking. Walking from one place to another. Or sitting on a bus or thinking or talking. My mind will keep going back to that one song and go, "Well, those last two lines, I just don't know..." And it'll start fingering it and eventually the whole thing will just fall into place.
ST: Lots of songwriters have said that their problems get solved while driving--
SV: Yeah. Your mind is occupied, so your other mind is left to play. You really need that time to do that. I was under a lot of pressure for the third album, and everyone was kind of stomping around and going, "Where's the rest of the songs? We can't finish the album without the songs." I started to feel that I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to go for a walk or go anywhere. And it looks as though I'm avoiding it. And I'm not avoiding it. I'm just going to do my work in the way that's the best way I can. But it looks like I'm avoiding it, so everyone goes, "No, you can't go to the health food store. You must stay here and finish the song." [Laughs] But you need that time to approach it obliquely. For some weird reason, that's where the answers come from. Sort of a left-handed approach.
ST: It would seem that your material would demand that kind of approach, as opposed to songwriters working to write radio hits, that go to it everyday-- SV: It's never worked for me. [Laughs] I've tried it a couple times, and every time I write a song to be a hit, it doesn't even sing. It doesn't work for me.
ST: Pete Seeger, who encouraged us to interview you, said that he agreed with Woody Guthrie that anytime you try to write songs commercially, you can harm yourself artistically--
SV: Well, you see, everyone knows that, and I knew that. I knew that when I was fourteen, and I knew that when I was 26. But somehow you forget, and you start thinking you can dablle in it just a little bit and twist it just a little bit and aim it in this direction. But for me, that kind of stuff just doesn't work. So I'm strict with myself now. I'm only going to do the things that are satisfying artistically. Because I realize that my own standards, when I'm left to my own devices, are very strict. And I have a whole system of rules for myself that are satisfying to me. So for a song to really ring true, it sort of has to go through this filtering process within myself. It's much stricter than what the record companies expect. [Laugh]
I realized that's really what's going to make it satisfying. Not trying to get a Top 40 hit. I learned a lot in the last year, from the last tour and the last album.
ST: What did you learn?
SV: [Laugh] I learned that it's not good to try to force a hit. I mean, as a producer you have to be aware of these things because your record company wants a single. I feel that it's better to not go for the pop thing if that's not what you're going to be. I mean, for a while I was confused cause "Luka" was a hit and I was never expecting it to be one. So I became popular, which made it pop. So this made me confused. Am I pop, am I folk? And the journalists were doing the same thing. Now I see that it's pop if it's popular, and other than that, it doesn't matter. I wrote "Luka" three or four years before it became a hit. I wrote "Tom's Diner" ten years ago. It wasn't pop then, but now it's pop.
ST: You actually wrote "Luka" before your debut album. Did you consider putting it on your first album?
SV: No. I needed some time for it to settle into the bag of songs. I needed some time to get used to it as a song. A lot of people felt it was catchy, and I used to feel insulted, because I'd say, "Catchy? Obviously you missed the point of the song."
ST: And yet it is. Musically, it is a catchy song.
SV: I guess it is. I think because I was aiming at such a complex subject that I was aiming for the simplest line to get there. Simple melodies, happy chords. I felt I had to make it accessible because it was such a dark subject. So I went all out. But I also tried to write in the language of a child. So that's probably why it worked, because it is so accessible.
ST: It's an upbeat song, and the melody is a happy one, as you said, especially for that subject matter.
SV: I'd been listening to the Lou Reed Berlin album that Sunday when I wrote the song. And you can really draw a straight line between "Luka" and that album. That Berlin album is filled with references of domestic violence and all kinds of violence. The songs are all in major keys. They're all done on acoustic guitar. So for me, ["Luka"] is like the extra song on the Berlin album. [Laughs] To me. Stylistically, it almost belonged there.
ST: I never would have guessed.
SV: No one ever draws that comparison.
ST: Did the record company choose it to be the single?
SV: I think when we produced it, everybody felt that it was going to be the single. I said, "Well, good luck. Knock yourselves out." Cause I had no expectation for it.
ST: When making the third album, did you then try to make one of those songs a radio hit as "Luka" was?
SV: The most obvious one, obviously, is "Book of Dreams."
ST: That was your intention while writing it?
SV: When I wrote it, it was just an interesting idea. And I thought, let's do this with the chorus. I had been listening to a lot of XTC at that point. Production. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, this will make everyone happy. Which, of course, it didn't, and it doesn't. [Laughs]
ST: What was it that you did to the song to make people happy?
SV: You repeat the chorus a lot of times. You make it bright. You put the hooks on it. You decorate it with riffs and hooks. But even so I think my idea of what a pop song is is different than a record company's. Because they weren't sure at first what the single was going to be. I was thinking "It's obvious!" I don't think they heard it.
I think it's a good song but most people seem to feel it's very obscure. And, again, it's one of those things where people say, "What did you mean by 'Book of Dreams'?" I said, "Well, 'in my book of dreams' is a phrase, like 'in my wildest dreams, in my imagination.'" That's the way I meant it. I didn't mean it as in my journal where I put my dreams that I dream at night. People think of it very literally.
ST: That's how I took it, that you were referring to an actual collection of dreams. I took it as a reference to Kerouac's Book of Dreams, which is a very faithful record of his actual dreams.
SV: Someone gave me that. I read some of it. I've never really been into Kerouac, though my brother is. You know, "Tired of Sleeping" is about night dreams. "Book of Dreams" is about day dreams and the future.
ST: The thing about Kerouac's book is that it's so revealing to write down, uncensored, your actual dreams. And he wrote in the introduction, "what shame I'd feel to see such naked revelations so stated." Which seems very similar to the process of writing songs, and expressing those interior ideas without the conscious mind getting in the way.
SV: Right. See, that's the hard part, when you start to have a little jury of critics: journalists, record company executives, boyfriends, family members, fans. When you start to have those people speaking up and going, "Hey, that won't work!" You have to work through that. Cause if you're really a songwriter in your blood, your instincts will take over. And once you're on the right track, there's no stopping you, really. Regardless of how famous you are and how much money you have. I think if you're really a songwriter, once you start, your instincts will really guide you. But you've got to get rid of the critics.
ST: How do you do that?
SV: Hide. [Laughs] You withdraw for a while.
Reading other people's stuff helps me.
ST: Songs?
SV: No, just other people's writing. Annie Diller's writing, for me. She writes essays. She wrote a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It's mostly her observations on life and nature and herself and art and fiction and she's just great, she's got this great mind. So you read her and you start to feel that you can do anything. You start to feel lit up by her vision. And so you can kind of catch it from her, or from other people. It's catching. It's contagious. You can catch the spirit again. But you have to be careful about that, to go towards those things that will help you and not make you judgmental towards yourself, or critical.
ST: So when you're writing, are you able to suspend that critical voice or does it still enter into it?
SV: Sometimes it still enters into it. But I find recently that if I'm writing about something that really interests me that the subject itself just draws me in and I'm not thinking about what the newspaper is going to say. So that helps.
ST: When you're writing, do you actively guide the meaning of the song or do you follow it?
SV: I try to do more following. I find if I try to lead it, then you get something that is stiff or contrived. Whereas if you go back to the original thing that provoked you to write the song, there's some answer in there. It's outside of yourself. It's in the situation that you're writing about. That's where the answer is if you get into trouble. I find that I feel more that I'm following something that is already there. There's a way of arranging the information so that it will make sense and be beautiful. And so it will be all in harmony and everything will feel right. And it's a question of wiggling it around until it falls into place.
A song, when it is really well done, feels balanced and it feels right. It's a question of manipulating it a little bit here and there, a little bit every day, for months, until it falls down, falls into the music. That's the way it feels to me.
You have to write about something real in the world. You can't just say, "Oh, I'll write about this." It has to be based on something actual.
ST: In your own life?
SV: Yeah.
ST: When you mentioned the way songs will fall into place, I thought of your song "Men In A War" --
SV: That was hard [Laughs] to write.
ST: I can imagine. It revolves around the idea of a phantom limb, that one would still feel a leg or an arm even after it is cut off, which isn't the easiest idea to get into a song. And the song is so perfectly balanced.
SV: That was a weird one, because I was not paying attention. I was driving somewhere in a car and it appeared almost like a telegram in my mind. Men in a war. And that's basically a medical fact. I thought, "I'd better write this down, because it's such a strange idea." And I thought, "Well, what are you after? What are you trying to say?" I wanted to bring the comparison of violence to your body. Whether it happens through a war, or whether it happens through sexual violence. The woman in the song is experiencing sexual violence. Some people don't get that, and they think she's getting an abortion. To me, there's a parallel between the two experiences. To me, that was valid enough reason to write the song.
But it was very hard. People listen to it, and it's not a clear anti-war song. It's not "We must end the war." Some people listen to it and they don't know how to feel. Except that when you sing it live, it really has a strong impact. And everybody just seems to start getting up and jumping around. Not dancing with joy, but just moving. The rhythm of it and the intensity of it just seems to hit.
ST: When I heard it, I didn't even think of war as much as how we have to deal with reality, that we still feel things even after they're gone.
SV: Yeah. When you receive a bulletin like that: "Men in a war who have lost a limb...", you start to think, "What am I trying to say and what is the reason for it?" And it's not so important that you state it in a song but that you know what it is. Because that's what forms the secret heart of your song.
People, when they listen, want to know what you're singing about. And if you know what it is, they'll know what it is. Not even that you have to say it, but if you know what it is, then they'll know. Because it will be there in the structure.
That one I don't know if I pulled off. That one took a long time for all the pieces to fall into place, and I still wasn't sure. I think if it were a perfect song, I probably would have edited out some more and done something else.
ST: It's a challenging idea to get into a song, and that seems like a signature of your work, that you will get some pretty ambitious concepts into a song, things most people wouldn't try.
SV: I try. Those things are interesting to me. If I'm going to write a song, I might as well try to write something that hasn't been heard before.
Although my ideal, and I have to say lately, I've been listening to Elvis Costello, all of his songs over the last ten years, and the great thing about what he does is that he still writes about love, thwarted ambition, jealousy, all these basic things in life that aren't particularly ambitious. Everybody writes about love. But at the same time he'll do it in a way that it's his and it's distinctive. He's not afraid to use long words, he's not afraid to use his vocabulary. He's not afraid to say, "I want you," and say it over and over again for five minutes. And it's still unmistakably Elvis Costello.
As a songwriter, I need to be able to say those things that are a part of everyday life: I need you, I want you. War must end. How you get to say them without sounding like a jerk or sounding simplistic, that's my next challenge. Because everyone says, "Oh, she's so intellectual." But I am trying to communicate. How do you say it but say it in such a way that it seems as if they haven't heard it before?
ST: It seems that you answer that question in your work by your use of images. You use pictures that show us something that allows us to feel for ourselves, rather than be told something.
SV: That's what I find beautiful. I found that to be one of Dylan's strengths. Not that he said war must end, which he did, but when he said, "A hard rain's gonna fall," and used the images of "white ladder covered with water" and "white man walking a white dog." All of these images have mystery in them and they say racism must end and all men must be brothers. But they don't come out and say it. They have it within the images, which we recognize from our own lives. And that to me is where his strength was. Not that he was a great politician, but that he was a great poet and he used those images to reveal those basic messages. Because it's not about messages. If it was just about printing messages, you could write a pamphlet or a bulletin on index cards and pass them out. So it's obviously not just messages that we're trying to give. It's got to work on some other level.
End of Part One.