As I'm walking downtown for the second day's interview, the story seems to be everywhere. About a dozen blocks from the loft, there's a restaurant, boarded up, called the Vega. A messenger boy pedals by on his bike, singing "Barbara Allen." Blips of Suzanne Vega abound. The first concert she ever saw - she was 19 - was one by Lou Reed, and his "Caroline Says, Part 2" showed her how to extend the folk tradition by exploring certain subjects she had previously thought beyond inclusion. Reed's influence can be heard in "Cracking" and "Neighborhood Girls." When she was 12 or 13, she went to what was called a 'free school' - 100 kids in a brownstone - "and basically they taught you all about nonviolence. Although it was the most violent school I ever went to. I wouldn't throw the first punch, but if I was hit, I would go crazy and hit back. I felt like I wasn't going to cry or be picked on anymore. The kids were pretty brutal."

When I asked her yesterday about her kids-as-weeds imagery in "Ironbound/fancy Poultry," she said: "Well, in my family, I think that my sister was the only planned birth. So we all felt like we just kind of sprouted up. I felt like a weed, and I was proud of it. Some people are cultivated roses, but I'm just this tough dandelion. Weeds are just there. They're tough. They stick around. You can step on them, and they'll still bounce back. They're not anything splendid, but they serve their little function. Someone once said I had a weedy voice, and I went, Yeah, so what?

"I never thought I was a really great singer. I thought, well, I'm a songwriter, so I have to sing my songs. I always considered my voice plain and fine - no big deal. the kind of voice that you use to sing to your children or your brothers and sisters. I like to think of it as a pencil. It's very useful. It's ordinary. Everyone's got one. Mine can carry a tune, but there's no vibrato, no great skill behind it. As a child, I didn't like vibrato. It seemed the way grown-ups sang. My voice is like a little kid singing a tune. She's putting on her socks and she's singing. That's all."

We sit at the table again. Vega lowers her head and runs her hands through her hair. It's a characteristic gesture, done without thought. Like her laugh, it's very endearing. On a drawing board, there's a wooden hand with long gold fingernails. Ivy crosses a window in diamond-shaped patterns. Paints and an easel stand in a corner on the brown hardwood floor. She shows me one of her first paintings: a self-portrait, angular and highlighting a huge eye. It's exceptionally good. I notice the dimple on her chin.

We talk about the High School for the Performing Arts, which she attended. The school made famous by the movie Fame. Going there must have been as turbulent as life at home.

"Well, same kind of thing," she says. "Because everyone had the same temperament, and they're all running around emoting and crying and yelling and screaming and kissing each other. I wanted to be a dancer. But I had this terrible fear that I was going to disappoint my parents. That I would be bad theater. That I would be boring and mousey and just disappear into the wall. I had this craving to be noticed by the teacher or by anyone. So I would stand in the front of the classes - always to the side, but in front." She laughs. "I was so silly.

I suppose I felt bitter sometimes because I was very aware of not being in the in-group. Everybody in the drama department wanted to be either David Bowie or Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. I was into Dylan and carrynig my acoustic guitar around and wearing these big sweaters and blue jeans. And everyone thought, Oh, she's just kind of missed her era. So I was very aware that I wasn't, uh, cool.

"Sometimes I'd think, You don't want to be involved in that typical teenage bullshit. You want to be an artist, you want to be a fucking Van Gogh, and that means you have to spend time by yourself writing in your notebooks. But in my heart, I'm sure I missed it. At one point, I did have a boyfriend, and we did go to a movie once. We went to see Tommy, and it was kind, of a thrill.

"A lot of my tteachers felt that I was talented but had things holding me back. They felt that I thought too much and could never just give myself up to the physicality you really need to be a great dancer. You have to have great technique and stop thinking about things when you're dancing. But I wasn't really interested in the techmique. I found it very frustrating and boring and irritating.

"So I was depressed a lot and very obsessive about eating. I would eat and eat until I couldn't eat anymore and then eat again a half-hour later until I just couldn't move. I'd get up at seven in the morning and walk from 102nd Street down to 46th Street and Broadway and take four dance classes. I was trying to do something to my body - I don't know what. Make it explode or something.

"So I gave up dancing after I left there. I said, I'm not going to make it as a dancer. I don't have the temperament. I don't have the technique. I can't stop eating. I can't control my body. So that was the end of the dream, in a sense."

This must have been very difficult to accept. Yet you ahd been writing songs and singing and going to auditions during your later high school years.

"It was a pretty major disappointment, yeah. I just didn't have what it took. There was a feeling of, Oh, I guess I'll just be an ordinary person. And it seemed so dubious that I could ever make any mark in music, since most people kept telling me that it was impossible. They'd say, You're out of style. You're doing that folk stuff, which is suicide. You may as well be a poet and collect welfare. And I couldn't get any gigs down in the Village. I'd drag myself down to the Other End every week and get rejected.' She laughs.

"I was playing and writing songs, but I always felt like that was my reserve. I had no musical training. I used to sing to my brothers and sister. Ed would sing Leadbelly songs in the kitchen, and I would come in and sing with him. Because that was a peaceful time. It meant that no one was arguing. When he was singing, it was like peace had come to the land.

"So there was a sense of being lost my first year of college. Of being doubtful of my abilities as a singer and a songwriter. Plus, I had this dread of really being fat, so I joined the swim team without even knowing how to swim. At the tryout, I started to drown, and they had to get the big pole and drag me out. They were like, What's your problem? But they said I had a good attitude, so I stuck it through for two years before I realized I was torturing myself for no good reason."

While you were at Barnard, you also started playing in some of the college coffeehouses, didn't you?

"Yes. And I started to get a little following. So I made this mailing list and sent out these flyers. I had a small, kind of hand-sewn audience, and I was very single-minded. I kept a notebook of every gig I got, what songs I sang, how I did my hair, what the audience response was and how much money I got. And each time, I would try to do it better. It was my self-discipline thing. If just one or two people liked me, that was enough to keep me going."

When your dream to be a dancer ended, why did you rule out writing short stories or novels?

"First of all, I wasn't sure I could do it. I started to write some short stories and couldn't get the emotion into them. All the details wouldn't add up to anything. It was like the music was missing. And when you're 18 or 19, the thought of sitting down and writing something more than 50 pages long is scary. How could I make it cohesive frmo beginning to end? I'd work on it for two days and go, Ah, this is boring." She pauses. "Also, I must have had some fear of competing with Ed. I knew how hard he worked.

"And there's something nice about working in a small medium like songwriting. There's something about a chorus that I really like. The idea that it comes back appeals to me. And you can all join in. There's so much satisfaction on spending a few hours on a song and really nailing it. And people will admire you for singing it. Whereas a novel seemed endlessly thankless."

And when you took an audition tape down to Folk City, people did admire you.

"Yeah. There wer people down at Folk City who had the same ideals that I did, and I was really happy to be part of the group. And I was the youngest one. As a songwriter, I was the baby. Most people down there were in their mid-30s. They'd go, There's this girl and she'w only 20 years old and she's got these songs. Wow. Who is she? These people weren't going, Oh, give it up. Keep your day job. They were like, Wow, that song's cool. They wanted to talk about the meaning of the words and the symbolism or the melodies. I felt accepted. I was popular. I'd stay out and drink all night, and I had a lot of fun. Actually, I felt sad in some ways in 1985 when the first record came out. Suddenly, I was picked out of there and flung onto a tour around the world. Then it's like you're not really part of the group anymore. I'd go back sometimes, but there was this awkward, she's-got-a-record-deal kind of thing. But that five years I spent there was like finding my own tribe of people, and it was really great."

Tell me what happened when you played the Albert Hall in London.

"Well, that's where D.A. Pennebaker had filmed Don't Look Back with Bob Dylan in 1965. And everyone was making such a big deal out of my appearance there, which made me feel that perhaps I wasn't up to all the expectations. I was tired and thought, What if I'm disappointing? I felt lost with all the film crews and the pomp and circumstance. Ron Fierstein, my manager, was really excited and going, This is the biggest gig of your career - of your life! And you don't want to hear that. You want to hear, Oh, everything will be fine. So I kept thinking, It's not such a big goddamn deal. I can walk out right now if I feel like it. But of course, I didn't. So there's pictures of me and the band stomping off the stage after the concert looking completely grim and upset. And teh audience is goitn Yea!"

Do you ever worry about being unduly influenced by other artists?

"No. I hope I am. I hope that I soak in some of it. I hope that I'm as witty as Elvis Costello. As sardonic and sharp and tongue-in-cheek. I want to be eclectic, playful, smart and funny as They Might Be Giants. You know, my sister Alyson and I collect information about them. I hope I am as mysterious and disturbing as Leonard Cohen. I want my images to have the kind of feeling that Dylan's do."

Let's talk about the new album. At first, I ahd a hard time with it. I felt moved, but some of the songs baffled me. They reminded me of how I'd felt when I first saw Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Particularly the opening scene where this kid - Bergman, I guess - watches a very disturbing montage from the whole Bergman oeuvre. It's a fast, Jungian blur of archetypes and primal, almost tribal, images. then he turns toward a glass wall and sees this woman - his mother, I suppose - and he reaches out a hand toward her.

"Well, what you described is very much how I felt when I was strting this album, because I didn't ahve any preconceived idea of what I was going to do. I'd come to the end of my songs - the songs that I considered public songs - so I had nothing to fall back on. Then I realized that some of the best songs that I've ever loved were songs where you don't knwo what the meaning is, but yo ulove them anyway because they make you think in strange ways. Like John Lennon's 'Strawberry Fields Forever' ot "I Am the Walrus.' So I felt that surrealistic way of working was a good way to work for right now.

"And I found that I was working from my dreams, because my dreams are really vivid and visual and really violent. And often filled with people I don't even know. The images stay with me for a long time - years and years. A man in the street. Children doing things. Children setting themselves on fire. Or a man is burning in the street. I would feel these things with me all day. Also, I wanted to approach this album by making notes of things I saw in the city - I had gone to London to try to write the songs - as well as things I saw in my dreams at night. Then I would mix them together."

Why did you call the album DAYS OF OPEN HAND?

"It's a line form 'Book of Dreams,' and I felt through the whole process of making the album that I was trying to receive songs and impressions. And when you tame a wild animal you approach it with your hand out like that." She opens her hand. "To me, it also meant kind of releasing the past and the future. That was the stance of it, as opposed to some of the earlier songs that were more defensive. I broke all sorts of rules for myself with this record. For the first time, I put in the major chords. And it made me happy because the songs still sounded like me, but they ahd a different texture and color than the old ones. Also, I suppose that the feeling of having met Richard and putting that piece from the past in its place is somewhere in there, too."

Do you like the new record?

"Well, I can't be objective. There's the relief that it was finished, and that I just didn't go, Sorry, guys, there's nothing left in there. Then there's this feeling of, Wow, I made all this up! I just sat in a room and made it up and now it's a thing. People will listen to it, and it will have some effect. I went to my first concert when I was 19, and six years later I had my own record deal. That still feels strange."

Although most reviewers have treated you pretty well, a few have said things like "Suzanne Vega is a yuppie's dream" or called your music "new waif music." "Her cold, icy eyes can bore into your psyche" cracked me up.

"I don't mind 'cold,' but I do mind 'precious' or 'She's so sensitive and frail' or 'She's up there with her big eyes,' because that's not how I carry myself. I don't think. I was surprised the first time I heard 'new waif.' I thought, what do they mean? I could see it in a Dickensian way, because Dickens' waifs were pretty smart and streetwise. They weren't pitiful. I didn't like the 'pitiful' overtones. I'm a person who's worked hard to keep my dignity both onstage and off, and I don't like it snatched away by someone who has never looked me in the face and doesn't know what my life has been like."

You don't mind "cold," though?

"No, because I think it can be accurate. It's the shell coming down, the uniform. At least if you're cold, you're respected."

End of Part 2/2

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Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski

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