Suzanne Vega is ready to dance again. It's been a good -- what? -- ten years since she declared herself tempermentally unfit to continue in the terpischorean course she'd folled at New York's High School of Performing Arts and decided to concentrate on being a folksinger instead. That worked out all right. It got her handsome face into magazines all over the world, so that even on foreign soild (and somewhat to her chagrin, for she is an essentially private public person) she hears her name screamed as she walks down the street. It got her an introduction to Sting, whose own pictures had once carpeted her teenage walls (she's 28 now) and who told her it was nict to hear songs with lyrics again. it got her into a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, who used two of her lyrics (alongside contributions from David Byrne and Laurie Anderson) for his Songs of Liquid Days. And--this may have surprised nobody more than Suzanne--it got her into the Top 20, with "Luka," the first single from her second certified "gold" LP, Solitude Standing. Now she's preparing to shoot the video for that album's title track, and in the privacy of her embarrasingly posh (nonetheless appreciated) Beverly Hills hotel room, she's been playing the song and whirling, skipping and jumping up and down. Wouldn't you?
"During the one section where the synthesizer's going dan dan dan dan dan, I find that if I do this turning thing that's sort of half like martial arts and half like Martha Graham--a contraction and release tyep thing--it's very satisfying."
Of course, there's no reason a singer should have to dance, especially one singer who can keep a big audience quiet and attentive just by singing--standing stock still, not even bothering to play her guitar. It's a voice that fascinates--cool, smooth and crystal clear--yet it seems to conceal as much as it reveals and impresses, like her songs, as both utterly frank and wholly mysterious. Yet, that Suzanne Vega's thinking about dancing again--that she is dancing, to these stacks of cassettes, to The Best of Blondie, to R.E.M.'s Murmur, to Peter Gabriel's So--is somehow important. It seems to stand for the larger issues of her life.
"Listening to that Peter Gabriel album last year," she says, "suddenly I felt like I could dance again if I wanted to, like I didn't have to be afraid of being the full person I think I am. I think that in my life and in my stage presence, I've had a tendency to make myself smaller than I really am, to be safe. I had a dream when I was a little kid where this truck was coming down the street, and rather than getting out of the way, I just made myself very small so that the wheels would go over me. I think i do that on stage to some degree, and I've done that in my life. And suddenly I've started to feel like, well, maybe I can be bigger. I can take it."
As to the reasons she quit dancing, well, that gets to the heart of things to that aspect of Suzanne's character that may be more responsible than anything else for her being where she is today. It's a nearly perverse disinclination to take direction of any sort, coupled with a mischievous inclination to sometimes undercut even her own expectations. A classic psychologica paradox: self-conscious and guarded on the one hand; willful, assertive, even capricious on the other. She notes a constitutional kinship to author Carson McCullers, whom she once played in an acting class: "She was very, very shy but also had to be the center of attention, and she was so pathetically mournful that it was funny as hell." To the uncareful eye, Vega might easily appear, as she says, the "pale, thin waif"--and the New Folk Madonna mantle that's been hefted upon her encourages the error--but a closer look reveals her to be a pale, think mule, the acme of stubborness: "I read in the press sometimes that I' self-effacing. But most people in high school would have described me as rather arrogant, I think."
And it goes way back before that. "My parents told me I had a lot of imaginary friends that I would bully: 'Be quiet and do what I say.'" Suzanne laughs, as she often will when revealing some part of herself. I think that I was a lot of fun to play with. I liked to be the leader, and if I wasn't, I was annoyed. I remember, in the first grade, playing Catwoman. This girl was supposed to be my daughter, Catgirl, and she was going, 'Go faster, Mommy.' And I'm going, 'Catgirl wouldn't call her mother Mommy.' So she says, 'Well, go faster, Catwoman.' I said, 'Catgirl wouldn't say anything to her mother. Just be quiet. Shut up.'" Suzanne Vega laughs again.
She was born in the last months of the 1950s in Santa Monica and quicly relocated to Manhattan--first to East Harlem, then to the Upper West Side, where she did mot of her important growing up. "My father did different things," she says. "His love was writing, but in the meantime, he was a social worker, and he was also a teacher. My mother's like a computer systems analyst and desiger, which I handn't really realized 'til about two years ago." her parents also sang blues, though it was "purely informal." There was always a guitar in the house.
"I think that I must have been frustrating to them," she says. "I wasn't very spontaneous, running-around, happy-go-lucky kid. I read a lot and I thought a lot, and if you asked me how I felt about something, I was apt to come out wit h a statement that didn't quite correspond to the question: 'How do you feel?' "I feel like a small, blue thing'--not that, but something similar. And they'd say, 'Well, what do you mean exactly? Are you happy or sad? Are you sleepy or hungry? What do you mean by that?' 'Well, I feel sort of...smooth. I feel kind of...rough around the edges.' I can see how that could be frustrating."
Long about the age 14, in the thrall of John Denver (of all people), she began write songs. The first was about one of her brothers (she has two, plus a sister), the second was about a freight train and the third was a "sad ballad about a girl whose...(THIS PART MISSING)
Her tastes graduated to Bob Dylan, Cisco Houston, Laura Nyro and, most especially, Leonard Cohen--none of whom were exactly happening in the Age of Glitter Rock, Rocky Horror and David Bowie (the orange hair/no eyebrows model). "I suppose I was looking for a kind of purity,'" she says.
Vega sat in a corner of the school lunchroom and played her unfashionalby acoustic guitar, clad typically in "a military-green army jacket with a silkscreen on the back of a Vietnamese woman with a baby in one arm and a gun in the other--I wore that for years--and this horrible mustard-colored turtleneck and brown corduroy pants...I saw a picture of myself then recently and it was like, 'Whoa!' Because now I recognize that kind of adolescent. You see them all over--they wear sneakers all the time, hair parted in the middle, long hair down to here, no makeup, read a lot. That was me."
She's no obsessive fashion plate now, but she comes across as sylish, and mustard seems to have been pretty well excised from her wardrobe. Vega's approach to self-presentation has remained characterictially unobliging. For years she's appeared onstage, and frequently off, in the same too-large tuxedo jacket (it helps make her smaller and has steadfastly resisted countless suggestions that she doll herself up to facilitate success. "To me, you put on clothes so you're not cold. Your face is just what's on the outside of your head. I was never interested in my face. I had a dream once when I was like fourteen that I removed my face. It was a very violent and bloody dream, and it was a real turning point for me for some reason. It was right after I'd really cut my hair. I shaved my head practically. And I dreamed that I made four cuts in my face with this can top and then removed my face. And I woke up going, 'Boy, I wish I hadn't done that.' And I put my hand up to my face, and it was on, and I was very relieved. Now I realize that's how the world perceives you--they look at your face. And so this is a useful piece of information," she laughs. "I'm starting to realize that you can manipulate it. If you wear bright red lipstick, people will think of you differently than if you wear pale pink. This is a great revelation to me at the age of twenty-eight, what every teenage girl learns when she's twelve."
Metaphorically, one might say Vega's face has been removed--taken off her head and stamped in multiple upon still--proliferating record jackets, posters, magazine spreads. "There is something a little weird," Suzanne says, "about going to a foreign country where people know you from your record. Suddenly, this thing that is separate from you carries a piece of you. You go to Japan and you're walking around going, 'Oh, I'm so mournful and melancholy and alone,' and right in the middle of this very deep and solitudinous mood, two Japanese teenagers come up and go, 'Suzanne Vega! Can I have your autograph?' It tends to knock you out of that mood almost immediately. In some ways it's very refreshing, too, because my whole life I've fallen back on this thing of 'I am alone here in this crowd.' If all of them turn around and go, 'Oh, I know you!' you can't really do that anymore."
But we're getting ahead of our story. At age 16, Suzanne felt secure enough about her music to follow Broadway down to Greenwhich Village to try her luck at the city's most fabled folk clubs. At 20, she took up residence there, dug herself into the circuit (she turned 21 at Folk City), met kindred spirits and expanded her horizons. The punk/new wave scene then exploding on the nearby Bowery did not escape her notice or interest, nor did the semi-poplular serious Soho avant-garde. She internalized Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, a good bit of rock'n'roll and maybe a little jazz and started playing a folk music that had less and less to do with folk music. Her guitar style (plucked, not strummed) became a combination of rich, thick arpeggios and sudden, biting attacks; her songs somehow managed to be at once abstract and journalistic, like sharply detailed, exquisitely composed photographs. She echoed others at times, but ultimately the words, the melodies, the deliver were all her own; she wouldn't have had it otherwise. And, as always, if you didn't like it, well, you could just lump it.
But the audience and the business came around. A & M Records released Vega's first, self-titled LP in 1985. It brought her a lot of "Next Big Thing?" attention, which the success of this year's follow-up seems to have justified.
"I did everything the wrong way," she says. "People would say, 'How come you're not more cheerful?' or 'You shouldn't complain onstage,' or 'You shouldn't wear black all the time, 'cause you disappear.' So I, of course, did those things because they said not to, and now I find I'm successful and that it means a lot to some people that I've become popular in the way I have. Which is really shocking to me, in a way, because the word 'popular'...I didn't like people in school who were popu lar. I didn't like bands who were popular. I felt, 'I'm not even going to bother trying to be popular, because I'm not going to be, so I'm not going to pretend.' And suddenly I find that I've sold more records in the U.K. than Sting. Wait a minute! And so I'm kind of adjusting to that. I can't pretend to be undergound.
"I have to really fight the urge to be perverse just for the sake of asserting myself. When everyone was asking me, 'What's this second album going to be? Writing any tunes?' this little voice in my head was going, 'Tell them you'll write songs when you feel like it.' In fact, four songs were written while we were recording. Steve Addabbo] is mixing the record, waiting for me to sing the lyrics, which I haven't finished, and I'm sitting in my hotel room going, 'What rhymes with fate?'
"Making records has forced me to learn that I have to work with other people. that pure ideal that I had when I was a kid of growing up and always living life with no compromises, which to me meant living in a place by myself and always having life my way, hasn't ahppened. you learn that you have to negotiate; if it's not one problem it's another."
If it's not the stubbornness, it's the self-consciousness. "One thing that's frustrating for me," Vega s says, "is that I still find that I'm very much myself on stage, and there's something embarrasing about it--whereas if you go onstage and you're larger than yourself, you feel great. You come offstage feeling released, like you've 'done a show.' When I go out I'm very confrontational, and I make the audience self-conscious, and so therefore I'm self-conscious together--as opposed to sor of losing yourself. I still worry a lot. I worry that I'm not very entertaining or that the audience isn't getting their money's worth.
"When I acted at school, I found this great freedom. I could do almost anything. I could throw myself on the floor and weep if I needed to. I'm not especially emotional in my private life, but I found that, as a character, I was. I found strength I didn't know I had. I could run around the stage. Now, when I'm singing and I think about moving onstage even a little, all the words just fly right out of my head. The little voices go on in my mind: 'She's moving! Look at this! She's moving an inch to the right!' And I'm, like, 'What's the next line to this song?'
"There's something very intellectual about what I do. Maybe half my personality is like that. Maybe sixty percent. But then there's this other part, which is the part of me that dances, that's very instinctive. I'd really love to get the two together, so that I could not feel quite as self-conscious. It's frustrating. I fell there's more in me that would like to come out, and I have to find the way."
And so Suzanne Vega is dancing again. Not in public, not yet. But She's dancing all the same, in her Beverly Hills hotel room and elsewhere, training at long last to lighten up, to sacrafice a little intractability for a little abandon. It's time to grow into the "bigness" the public is asking of her--and she knows it, despite "secret dreams" of disappearing to another country under and assumed name to "not be myself" for a while. She's ready, even anxious, to try. And the next time she dreams of an oncoming truck, she may not have to shrink out of the way; she might just skip right over it.
Submitted by Wendy Chapman
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