Her self-titled debut album made her a phenomenon. Her second album, SOLITUDE STANDING, made her a star. With her third album, DAYS OF OPEN HAND, Suzanne Vega has evolved into one of the clearest, purest, most poetic voices of the nineties, a new decade searching for a sound, a style, a zeitgeist all its own. Zeitgeist translates literally as the "spirit of the time." What we have here is a spirit of introspection, of contemplation, of dreams etched with care inevery one of the songs she's written and performed. Suzanne Vega is a musician who dives deep into the waters of our own subconscious selves, who turns her most innermost self into music.
The facts are easy enough to detail; the person is a lot harder to define. Suzanne grew up in New York City, a shy teenager who describes herself as being "so inarticulate I felt like a black smooth surface." And so she wrote and performed mostly music in the great tradition of folk songs, music she'd perform in church coffeehouses, where the shyness could be obscured behind the simple joy of singing for friends and others. In person, she may have been withdrawn, but onstage, she was Suzanne Vega, with some songs to sing, and people listened.
She went to New York's High School of Performing Arts as a dance major, but soon realized that it was the music that made her feel like dancing. In her first experience at a rock concert, she discovered Lou Reed, and her outlook was transformed. "Suddenly I started feeling that I could be experimental," she recalls. "You could write a song with no chorus or no melody. I felt like all the restraints were taken off."
Suzanne graduated from Barnard College in 1982, a rough time for singer/songwriters with a penchant for the folkways of the past. British New Wave was flooding the air, Dance Music was tentatively recovering from the great disco panic of the seventies, Country music was enjoying its brief vogue, ballads were lulling us to sleep and Suzanne Vega, existing in a space away from most trends was playing in Folk City in Greenwich Village where Bob Dylan got his start, not a five minute walk from CBGB's, where Punk was king. Her music flowed from a source similar to what had inspired Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and their acoustic hordes. But, in her own words, her music isn't "pastoral" or "escapist." Call it as some did, "New Waif." But mostly call it the music of Suzanne Vega.
Albums followed, along with a burgeoning following. First SUZANNE VEGA in 1985, a brilliant debut that students of the mid-eighties felt was directed at their hearts and minds. In teh album's wake came performances at London's Royal Albert Hall and The Prince's Trust Benefit at Wembley Arena, along with an invitation to write the lyrics for two songs on composer Philip Glass' SONGS FROM LIQUID DAYS album (ultimately sung by Linda Ronstadt and Janice Pendarvis). She wrote "Left of Center" for the soundtrack to the movie Pretty In Pink, working with Joe Jackson and Arthur Baker. The old folkie label was beginning to wear thin. Suzanne Vega was clearly turning into something else, and something else again.
In 1987 came SOLITUDE STANDING, and her first broad-based success with the Top Five song "Luka," a riveting latterday folk meditation on the subject of child abuse, told from the child's point of view. Thanks in part to the minimalist black and white video for "Luka," Suzanne became both a voice and a face, a haunting presence two times over.
Very probably, Suzanne Vega could have turned songs like "Luka" into a personal cottage industry, writing and recording hits about drug abuse, incest, teenage suicide and so forth. But her need, as an artist, is to continuously explore, define and redefine. Suzanne Vega recreates herself with every album she records. Which brings us to DAYS OF OPEN HAND, her latest and most complex work, an album with surreal images from dreams, everyday places and the future.
"Yes," she says, "the future. Things to come. That was a theme I found emerging from a lot of my songs. Songs like "Book Of Dreams," "Predictions," even "Tired Of Sleeping" is very special to me. It's about having bad dreams, or at least very vivid dreams, and wanting to wake up from them. There's probably more to it as well, except I don't always understand what all the songs are about, even after I've written them. "Tired Of Sleeping" came from actual dreams I had. Dreams stay with me for years and years.
"I wonder when I'll be waking It's just that there's so much to do and I'm tired of sleeping..."
This time around Vega co-produced her own album, along with Anton Sanko. The sound, aided by accomplished misicians like Sanko on synthesizers and guitars, Marc Shulman, also on guitars, Michael Visceglia on Bass, Frank Vilardi on drums and percussion, Philip Galss, who arranges the strings for one song, and John Linnell (Of They Might Be Giants) on accordion, is the richest and most complex heard from Vega yet.
DAYS OF OPEN HAND is an album about dreams, both subconscious and conscious. And Suzanne Vega says that, beyond having her songs heard, she has a dream that's long been with her. "I've always wanted to be a really great artist, and I think I'm learning how to be a better performer. Those are my dreams at the moment. My dream is to put together a show where I'm really giving my best."
"Let's tell the future Let's see how it's been done. By number. By mirrors. By water. By dots made at random on paper... One of these things will tell you something."
And then, there's the dream that did become a reality for Suzanne Vega is between SOLITUDE STANDINGand DAYS OF OPEN HAND. A dream of return and reconciliation that makes this the most cathartic album of her brief career. "One thing that happened between the last album and this one is that I made contact with my biological father. I hadn't seen him since I was a baby. There was a sense of coming to terms with where I come from physically. You feel there's a piece of the puzzle that's been put into place when you meet a person of your own flesh and blood that you haven't seen before. It was a strange feeling of recognizing someone I'd never seen. I recognized portions of myself in him, in his body , the way he was built, the shape of his neck and shoulders, his hands. I also found out my grandmother had been a musician, a drummer in an all-girl band on the road in the Thirties and Forties, whom he had never met because he had been adopted as a child. It seemed very strange how the musical ability followed through the generations, though we didn't know each other. Knowing that story suddenly made me trust my own blood. It gave me confidence. Before, I felt it was just my instinct. Now, I know music is in my blood."
"Number every page in silver Underline in magic marker Take the name of every prisoner Yours is there, my word of honor In my Book of Dreams..."
Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski
VegaNet@aol.com
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