Suzanne Vega: It's hard. I find myself, when listening, that I'm a terrible listener. You make up your own words. You can't understand what [Elvis Costello's] singing sometimes, so you'll sing along, and you'll sing "in public" and it turns out he's singing "in Clubland." [Laughter] So I find that as a listener, I'm as eager for the romantic stuff as anybody else and tend to say, "What's he talking about?" But then as a songwriter, of course, I really admire him.
Basically, I think we're all children where that's concerned. We want to hear the chorus. We want to sing along. So you have to address that, too. As a listener, you're still basically in your child mind. That's where you learn songs.
So you're not the type of listener who sits there with the lyric sheet--
Oh, I do that as well. But I'm surprised by how much of my listening is done when I'm cooking or when I'm dancing around the apartment and I'm listening to R.E.M. And of course R.E.M. is classic because you can put in your own words, practically. [Laughter] They're still great songs.
So I'm not that surprised.
Another person I like is Natalie Merchant, who has that ability to really take an unusual angle and make it work as a song as well.
Latly I'm thinking more about melody, because I never used to. I used to think, well, the rhythm's there, the words are there, so it's fine. Rap, for example, makes a lot of sense to me because that was the way I had always thought of music also. It's rhythmic, and you spend a lot of time on the words and the sophistication of the idea. But the melody is like, who cares? But working with my band I realized that they liked melodies. They'd like to have a few more notes. They don't want three chords, they'd like some more. They'd like to have a bridge. So I try to oblige them.
It does seem that your songs are written more to rhythm than to a melody. "Cracking" is just that; it's really a rap song.
[Laughter] Yeah, or "Neighborhood Girls." Which is why it makes me laugh that "Tom's Diner" took the direction that it did, cause it makes sense. That's the way I used the language. So I feel this kind of strange affinity for rap music and the way that they use the language: short words with lots of consonants, and it's hard and it's fast and it's rhythmic.
Is rap satisfying to you as a listener?
Up to a point. It depends who it is, of course. Some are great and some are terrible.
With "Tom's Diner," they took it and overdubbed the rhythm track without your consent?
Right. And the record company wanted to know if we should sue them or if we should release it as a single. And I said, "Let's release it," because I thought it was funny and well done. I thought it was a good idea.
So the first time you heard it--
It made me laugh.
Actually, there's a little project I've been putting together. There's been tons of bootlegs since then; all different versions of "Tom's Diner." In all different languages and all parts of the world. Jamaica... So I've put together twelve different versions of "Tom's Diner" and we're gonna put that out to show what happened to the song. A little statement, because it seemed so weird that this one song ended up being sung in Swedish and German and that black people covered it and white people covered it. It just seemed to take on its own life. People changed the lyrics, they put themselves into the song, they made the song about something else entirely, there's one version about the Gulf War. People just took it and went crazy with it.
So my little thing, my little song about a diner that I wrote ten years ago had this weird spin-off and everybody started sending me these covers. It's like a sociological experiment, you know, to put it together and put it out.
Was that song written about the Tom's Diner on 112th in New York?
Yeah.
You said that "Men In A War" came to you like a bulletin. Do you have any idea what the source of those kind of ideas is?
It's like I hear a voice. Yeah. It sounds a little spooky: "Oh, she hears voices." But the best songs are just like that. I'd say it comes from your subconscious. A mystic might say it comes from God, but I don't want to say God because I'm a Buddhist and I don't believe in that, necessarily. It's when you are connected with something outside of yourself. It's when you are connected with something happening in life. It relates back to paying attention to the situation that's outside of yourself. Does that make sense to you? In other words, it's not enough to just invent it. It has to be connected to something real outside of yourself. In life. I don't know how else to describe it.
When receiving it, do you think it's a bulletin you are sending to yourself?
It doesn't feel that way. "The Queen and The Soldier" was one where, again, I had been circling for months. At first it was an "Alice In Wonderland" kind of song with a red queen and a white queen, and they were living in the same castle and they were going to have a fight, and I thought, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I will not tolerate this scene anymore."
So then I got rid of one of the queens and had the queen by herself in the castle. Again, this takes months of circling. Then when I had the soldier come to the door, the whole thing seemed to happen in front of my face as though I had nothing to do with it. And all the details were right there and you know you've really got it when everything starts to rhyme of its own accord. And the rhythms and the rhymes just seem to be right there. And it seems inevitable. And you're kind of held in the grip of this for a few hours. For two or three hours you're just held by this and you have to finish it. You can't just leave it. You're completely absorbed by this thing. And it seems to be taking place in front of you as though you're watching it. It's a very peculiar thing. And it's wonderful when you feel it. And later you look back and think, "How did I do that?" And it's almost as though you didn't do it. And it's very scary, because you're sure it's never going to happen again.
I was watching a special on JFK. And I noticed that people, when they are very moved by grief, that their language became very condensed and would start to rhyme. And they weren't being poetic. They were trying to express something that meant a lot to them. And I noticed that the quality of their language changed. Suddenly they started to speak in that way that you speak when you're writing songs, if you're close to something truthful. It was very eerie to watch and see that.
Also, a lot of religious writings are in verse. It makes me feel that there's something about rhythm and rhyme that gets close to the truth of things. I think it's connected.
You mentioned people in grief. Do your songs come at times of grief and other emotional turmoil?
Usually there is some feeling of fighting my way through something very hard. I keep hoping that I can write happy, joyful songs, too. I'd like to write something like Stevie Wonder. He has such pure, joyous feelings that it hurts. I'd love to write something like that.
Writing truly happy songs, the way Stevie has done, is pretty rare in songwriting.
Yeah, although there are other things that might be close. Like They Might Be Giants, for example. I love listening to them because their sense of playfulness, it kills me, it floors me. I love it. And it's not just pure cleverness, because there is a certain poetic core to a lot of their songs, too. It's not the joyful thing that Stevie Wonder has but it is a playfulness.
Is writing for you a playful experience?
At its best. There's a feeling of relief when it's finished. It's like doing a puzzle. At its best. That's when no one's pressuring me, or looking at me, or trying to get me to finish writing, or trying to get me to face some deadline. That's a really big drag.
You get a lot of that?
I've gotten some of it, just because we're all still learning how to balance the artistic thing and the business thing.
After the success of "Luka," was there pressure for you to write another song like that one?
No, I think everyone around me realized it wasn't going to happen like that again, that there was no way that you could recreate it. No one ever said to me, "Let's do another song like that."
You mentioned that phenomenon when things start to rhyme of their own accord. Does that make you feel that these songs are already written, in a sense, and that what we have to do is uncover them?
It used to feel that way to me. Now I feel, maybe with just this last batch of songs, [that] they feel more contrived. I can see where the cracks are and where the seams are and where I've pasted things together to make them whole.
At its best, I feel that it's like you described. "The Queen and The Soldier" seemed that way to me. "Luka" was kind of like that, although I was aware I was doing something I hadn't been doing before in quite that way. It's kind of dangerous to fall into that because then you lose control. You feel like, "Well, it came that way," so I have no control over it. Whereas I'm trying to teach myself more about melody and crafting a song, so you have to know when to step in and manipulate it a little. If you just give up to it and say, "Well, that's the way it arrived," then it's kind of absolving yourself of responsibility. [Laughs]
Sometimes it seems it can arrive wrong, if you've got a faulty connection, and you have to keep digging to get it right.
[Laughs] Right. Or people will go, "Why did you kill the soldier?" [Shrugs.] That's just the way the message came. I didn't kill him. It just had to be done. [Laughs]
You've mentioned working on melodies. Are you trying to write melodies that have bigger ranges?
I'm trying to think about it a little bit more. Just trying to filter in information about what a melody is and how to develop it. And that takes some thought, to really see what makes a good melody, how does it develop. And you can do that by covering other people's songs. Covering Elvis Costello's songs is a huge challenge for me because he's really musical.
Yeah. They're hard to play.
And they're hard to sing. And his phrasing sounds so effortless that you think, I can do this, no problem. And then you start to do it and you get completely floored.
So I'm just thinking about it. I find I tend to write in the same intervals. "Tom's Diner" has a very limited but a specific melody, which a lot of the songs don't. "Predictions" doesn't, even "Book Of Dreams" doesn't. I used to think "Marlene On The Wall" had a great melody until I tried to sing it without the chord. [Quickly hums melody, emphasizing the repetition] And then you find outit's all two notes, and you think, well, I thought it was a good melody, I didn't know it has no melody at all. [Laughs] So it's a question of being more graphic. Getting a clear shape in your head. What does it look like? And taking it from there. And stretch a little more.
What makes a melody great? Is it the use of large melodic skips?
No, I think it's more the line of it. Not so much that it has big jumps or little jumps. For me, I tend to write two, maybe three notes. So for me it's just being aware of where things go. Like "Institution Green" for me was a step. [Sings: "Institution green..."] Because it has a very definite melody. But it doesn't develop. If you're thinking about it consciously, about the development, you can listen to people like Julie London or Cole Porter, or those people, to get really great melodies, and classic melodies. The Beatles.
Do you write all of your music on guitar?
With the last album I started to experiment with keyboards, but I find that it's harder. There's something that happens about holding a guitar that I love. I'm more moved when holding a guitar, and it tends to put me in that weird, trancy state better than... a Fairlight. [Laughs]
On guitar, do you find yourself going to the same patterns over and over?
Yeah, and that's why it's good to do it with the band, or to listen to other people, and analyzeit, and say, "What rhythm is that? What chords is he using that you like? What do you like about that?" And then get somebody to teach it to you.
Do melodies ever come apart from the guitar?
Sometimes the melody will come apart from the guitar. "Institution Green" did. And "Tom's Diner," I heard that one for piano. I heard it as like a Truffaut film score, 1962, like a honky tonk almost, or like a lilting French thing. And I didn't play piano, so I just thought we'd sing it without any accompaniment. But that popped into my mind whole. And sometimes a melody will do that. Other times it will come because of the chords I'm playing on guitar.
I realized if I started the show with "Tom's Diner," it really drew people in instantly. And I was in this very minimalistic state where I was wearing my black tuxedo, and I'd stand there and just start by snapping my fingers and singing, "I am standing..." And everyone would stop wiggling and drinking their drinks.
The productions of your albums, from the beginning, have always been so sensitive. It always seemed as if it was completely based on your guitar parts and fleshed out from there, as opposed to a producer imposing something onto the song.
They were careful. Sometimes I think they were too careful, because at that time I wanted to have something that was rougher sounding. I was kind of surprised when I heard it back after it was mixed and mastered and realized how ethereal it was. It made me depressed. A lot of people like that sound, but it was not what I had intended. What I had intended was something that was much more along the lines of R.E.M. Something much more roots-like, instead of this ethereal, almost New-Age sound. Some people seem to think that I was deliberately moving in a New-Age direction. Which I'm not. It was never my intention.
I remember complaining to Lenny [Kaye, the producer], and going, "Lenny, it doesn't sound like a band," and he said, "Well, Suzanne, it's because you don't have a band. That's why it doesn't sound like a band. It's not a band. Get a band." So I did, for the second record, and it's lasted through until the last one we made.
And does that second album have more of the sound you wanted?
Not really. [Laughter]
It sounds like a continuation--
Yeah, it sounds like a continuation. It doesn't have the band feeling. I think to some degree, people do what's natural for the songs. The songs dictate what will be done to them. So even though you may have the best of intentions, you can't coerce them. They won't be shoved.
I'm not really complaining. I just think that when we perform live, there's an immediacy that a lot of people seem surprised by. I think also that in real life I'm a lot more directed and flesh and blood than I seem to be. It relates to what you said when I came in. Everyone thinks I'm going to be off in a corner. Today, I feel a little frail. But normally I seem to have a much more direct presence than what has come through on the records.
Did you normally record voice and guitar and then add the other parts?
No, the other way. It was done the conventional way, the click track and drums, bass.
Was "Tired Of Sleeping" written for your mother? The verses start with "Oh, Mom..."
Not really. In fact, I wondered what she thought of it. We never really talked about it. That's kind of a strange song. I started writing it about eight years ago. It was something I found in one of my notebooks. "Oh Mom, the dreams are not so bad..." And I couldn't figure out what the rest of it should be, so I just left it there. And eight years later I had this thing of "there's so much to do and I'm tired of sleeping." And suddenly all of the dream images came out. It all gelled, all of a sudden. It's kind of to my mom, but not really. If she asked what it was about, I couldn't tell her.
The image in my mind is that of a child is sleeping. She's having a bad dream. She's probably said something in her sleep, or shouted, and the mother comes. The child wakes up and says, "I'm fine, you can go back to bed." The child is comforting the mother. I'm tired of sleeping anyway, I was thinking of getting up, don't worry, go back to bed. But then, of course, the dream images that the child is having are terrifying. The bird on the string. But there's this constant need to comfort the mother. It's weird. It relates to my life. All the characters in the song relate to my life in some way. I think the kids of the church steps are my brothers and sisters. But that gets terribly Psych 103. But it almost doesn't matter. What matters more is the feeling of the song.
The images have their own context. If you sing that song in Czechoslo- vakia, where they just had a revolution, it has a whole different resonance than if you sing it in San Fransisco, or in a college town. The college kids will feel it's a psychedelic song and people in Czechoslovakia feel that you're talking about rising out of sleep and releasing yourself from oppression. Both readings are true.
I love the verse, "The kids are playing in pennies, they're up to their knees in money in the dirt of the churchyard steps." It's like an image from a Bergman film, where you see something but you're not sure what it means, or if it's real.
That's an image I saw in a dream. For a long time when I sang that song, I would feel like crying. It took about a year to be able to sing it and not want to cry.
All of these are actual dream images. And some people say, "That's cheating! You can't take images from your dreams and just put them in your songs." They forget that having a dream is different from writing a song. You can have all the dreams you want to make the song out of it, you still have to craft it, you still have to make sure if it rhymes and scans and does all of that stuff.
End of part 3
Continue with part four of four
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