Jane Simon looks behind the low public profile of Suzanne Vega and discovers the complex personality of a succesful songwriter.

Portraits by Peter Anderson

Suzanne Vega. Greenwich Village. 'Marlene On The Wall.' Joni Mitchell. Blah, blah, blah, blah...

Forget all that and start again. She is not who you thought she was.

If you were a singer-songwriter in New York around 1976 you played teh folk clubs. Well, what else were you going to do with an acoustic guitar? Get a gig at the Ritz? But the last two years have seen an enormous change in fortunes for Suzanne Vega.

Her self-titled LP last year and two well-received singles, 'Marlene On The Wall' and 'Left Of Centre,' have made her reputation. Her concerts in this country have all been sell-outs, and tickets for her just completed British tour were cleared out months ago.

And all she ever wanted to do was write good songs. Not that she has a high public prfile though.

When we meet, she has just bought some tapes of Clannad and Kate Bush to listen to in the bus when they drive from Norwich to Leeds. The people in Backs record shop didn't recognise her.

"Nobody ever recognises me. Someone yelled out once, Oh look, there's the band. But they didn't recognise me. They probably thought I was the girlfriend."

When Suzanne was about eight or nine, she found out that the Puerto Rican writer she thought was her father wasn't her father at all. She had been brought up thinking herself to be half Puerto Rican and suddenly she wasn't. An incredibly interesting situation to find yourself in, but how did it feel at the time?

"I don't remember my reaction because I wasn't very demonstrative as a kid, but it was probably some sort of embarrassment, and wondering what the hell this was about. Like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me go away and think about it for ten years.

"Suddenly I felt that everthing I had known was kind of stripped away, which is a feeling I've had often and I htink that's probably had a lot of effect on my songwriting. Because every time I look at someone I think, You could strip everything away. YOu could strip away their name, you could strip away their beliefs, strip away who they think they are and you'd still have a person there you have to address.

"So when I write, that's the part of the person I'm aiming for - the part that's been stripped away."

Have you ever written a song about that particular situation?

"I did, but not in the way you might think. There's a song I wrote on the Philip Glass album, 'Songs From Liquid Days' and the lyrics go...

'If you had no name, if you had no history/

If you had no books, if you had no family/

If it were only you, naked on the grass/

Who would you be then/

This is what he asked/

And I said; I really wasn't sure/

But I'd probably be cold/

And now I'm freezing'

"I don't think even Philip Glass knows what the song was referring to. Because I remember my father once asking me those questions exactly and, of course, later on I found out why."

Did it change the way you thought about yourself?

"I guess it clarified a few things. I had suspected I was different in some way, although I didn't know what it was and maybe that put the finger on it."

Did it help you to know that it wasn't your imagination, and to know why?

"No, because then I thought, Oh wow, now I'm erally different! Now I'll never be normal!"

How did you like playing the Royal Albert Hall?

"It was probably the biggest gig I'd ever done in my life, so I was very relieved when it was over. The thing I came up against in the States was everybody said, Isn't that where Dylan played? Also because they were filming the second night I felt all this pressure to be perfect, and I'm not..."

You didn't look like you were nervous

"That's because I was upset!" she says, collapsing with laughter and surprise. "See, I've been doing it long enough to control my emotions onstage, but there were a million things going on in my head."

Like what?

"Like, oh maybe I should just leave - how would that be? Maybe I won't tell any more stories. That's a very common reaction for me. I always feel uncomfortable before i go on and after I come off."

Would you prefer not to have an audience, then; just to write your songs and play for yourself?

"I don't think so. I started writing songs when I was about 14 and shortly after that I decided I should go out and start singing, even though I hated it, and that's something I've never been able to explain. I guess I have to keep it from being too personal.

"Like if one person gets up at the Albert Hall and leaves, I can't stand there and wonder about that because there are 4,999 other people still there. But ten years ago, if I was angry at an audience, or thought they were stupid, they'd know about it."

What did they do that made you angry?

"Well people would make comments like, Hey baby, how come you never smile? Or they'd put their feet up on stage while I was singing. At that time I was about 16 or 17, not exactly worldly wise, and I didn't know how to play to an audience."

Was that something you learned at the School Of Performing Arts?

"Not exactly, because I was studying dance, but the thing I learned from dancing was how you could make people look at you without saying a word. Like you could come onstage and stand still and you'd comand a certain attention just by your presence. Everyone can tell just by looking at you that you know what you're doing even thouhg you haven't done anything."

What's the first thing you think about when you wake up in the morning? Do you feel very positive about things?

"Yeah, lately I feel pretty terrific about almost everything. I feel that I've adjusted to all the stuff that has happened in the last couple of years and I'm looking forward to working on the next album.

"For a while, I think I had a dip in my confidence because the first album had come out and I was starting to feel maybe I had nothing else to say. Because my whole life, my dream was to make an album, and I thought, Well, what do I need to make another one for? The first one is still perfectly good; they can listen to that for a whole."

What I like most about your writing is the way you look kind of sideways at things, or rather, your ability to get inside a situation and look out. What are you writing about at the moment?

"There's a couple of things.

"I was reading the biography of Kaspar Hauser. He lived in Germany in the early 1800s and because he was heir to the throne, he had been locked in a basement from the time he was born until he was 17 and then suddenly set free. So his problem was, how do you learn to be a human being? The book explains his coming to power and it's really a tragic story because he's murdered in teh end, but I thought his perspective would have been interesting.

"It's that stripped away thing again. In some ways he was so stripped away, he was almost like an animal. He'd never seen the sun and he could only say one sentence, which was I want to be a rider, like my father. And they had given him one toy to play with in the whole 17 years, which was a small wooden horse. So I was trying to see how you could take a story like that and turn it into song form."

Do you get interested in other people's situations because they remind you of something you've experienced yourself?

"I think it would be nice to think that would be true, but I'll sometimes study people for their differences. I have what I call my scanner, and I take it out to try to figure out people's histories and their eccentricities and why they do what they do. Especially with my band, who are very funny.

"They're all really smart, and also slightly peculiar... because they're not a normal rock 'n' roll band. I think if their lives depended on it and they had do do the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, they still wouldn't know how to do it. But they read a lot, and so I'm always trying to figure out like why did Sue (the drummer) ask for a typewriter at the soundcheck, which she did about a week ago. They're the kind of things I spend time thinking about."

And what answers do you come up with?

"I don't know if I come up with any answers necessarily. Everybody has different symbols, different things that are meaningful to them. I remember a Joni Mitchell song about a business man where she says, " You could have been more than a name on a door', which I thought was a very superficial view, because everybody, whether they're yuppies or whatever they are, has some story behind them.

"And I'm struck by the fact that everyone seems to nees the same things, attention, food, shelter, sleep, understanding. And that even the most ahrdened people will come around if you listen to them.

"In some ways, I think that's what I do with the audience, which may seem weird, because I'm the singer and they're supposed to listen to me, but at the same time, I feel that I'm there to listen to them; to receive their impressions and what they want and in some way give it to them. Depending...

"I mean, sometimes you have really bizarre fans and you dont care what they wnat, but that's something else."

Is Buddhism a nice religion to be

"Yeah, but you would not believe that something so simple could be so difficult. The simple part is that you repeat the same phrase over and over again. The difficult part is that you do it twice a day, every day for your whole life. And that's really tough, because there are definitely days you don't want to. But it's for creating value in your life, and I think that I've seen myself change almost completely from ten years ago. If I had known ten years ago what my life would be like today, I would have been really happy."

In what ways have you changed?

"Well, for instance, I used to be fixated on eating. I used to be able to eat embarassing amounts of food and then half an hour later, eat again. That was a horrible feeling, to feel that you were in the grip of something irrational that you couldn't control. And with Buddhism, the different things in your life that you treat as objects of worship, lik food say, it will teach you to replace that with something of value. You could chant for all the food in the world, but it wouldn't do you any good, because then you'd get it and still not be happy. So you learn to chant for other things and you find out what makes you happy ultimately.

"See, you receive a scroll, which is what you chant to and that represents your life in its highest form, so then what you end up worshipping is your life, which to me is a great thing.

"It's not like, oh, if I'm really good, God will grant me this and that, or after you die you'll go to heaven. Your faith is grounded in something real, and there's nothing abstract about it at all. It's right here."

Does it help to be skinny if you're a folk singer?

"Not really. I think I look less like a folk singer because I've been borderline, really too skinny, and then I look like Patti Smith. I went from one extreme to the other. I went sailing past the normal weight into this other land of complete fragility. I've seen pictures where I look like I've just come off heroin. Like, oh yes, this is Suzanne in her On The Edge Days.

"I think what I was trying to do was be streamlined, and kind of like the girl in "Straight Lines." I was trying to cut away all the extra stuff in my life I didn't need, including weight, but I found out that instead of being strong and simple, that I was cutting into myself and I was really weak and not strong at all. SO I have to look after taht now, because I'm not really a frail person and I hate feeling frail."

What things do you value these days?

"It means a lot to me to continue working. To set out to do something and achieve it. It's been interesting to have some money because I never had any before and you can buy things like a video camera, but I don't think of it as an end in itself. I guess because my family grew up with quite a bit of suffering, self-inflicted and otherwise, so whatever happens, I always feel that's the thing I come back to.

"Mostly I'm trying to understand, trying to understand people and why they do what they do. Myself included."

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Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski

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