Come with me, if you can, to the passenger seat of my mother’s 1996 Mercury Sable, one early spring afternoon around the turn of the millennium, as we drive out of town up the lakeshore, north, towards home. We’ll get to all the facts soon enough, but for now, breathe in this atmosphere: light, motion, the squirm against the seatbelt, the smells of salt and snowmelt, the hard black lines of the trees against the bright grey sky, the sun warm on the plush upholstery, the swish of slush under the wheels. The sense of moving towards something new even as, for the first time, you discover you can move backwards through your own thoughts, retracing feelings you’d forgotten. A beginning of memory. This song, coming through the tape deck: the first track of Suzanne Vega’s debut album, the guitar’s twang tracing a path as liquid and obvious as the bits of ice trailing up the windshield, leaving streaks of clear water through the veil of dirt on the glass. Everything I think I want to say is packed into the moment the light turned green and we accelerated forward: precision, and possibility, and uncertainty, and revelation. Grit and magic. Sidewalks and ghosts. Motherhood and daughterhood, girlhood and ungirlhood. Machinery and memory, madness and meanness, sorrow and joy and starting over. There’s really a lot to talk about, and the best I can hope for is a decent skim across the surface, a quick curling cut like the blade of an ice skate over a deep, dark pond. Or, if I’m lucky, a cracking-open-of. A letting-in-of-light. Walk with me, and we will see what we have got.
suzanne vega
Showing 21 posts tagged suzanne vega
Left of Center // Suzanne Vega
The first time I ever heard “Left of Center” was live in concert at the Fitzgerald Theater on Mother’s Day, 2003. By that time, Suzanne Vega had reached 44 years of age, smashed out of the New York City folk revival scene with her self-titled debut, topped charts worldwide with “Tom’s Diner,” won a Grammy for “Luka,” married a producer, made two albums with him, divorced him, released another (much better-produced) post-divorce album, assembled a greatest-hits compilation (literally entitled Retrospective), left her label, and embarked upon single motherhood, her daughter only a handful of years younger than me. By the time that May rolled around she had already secured her place in popular music history several times over; in fact, there are probably people who would argue that as she stood alone on the dark stage, guitar in hand, the best moments of her career were already behind her.
But to me, up in the balcony and buzzing with joy, everything felt new. I was eleven years old and it was my first rock concert. I loved Suzanne Vega –– the way you love the music woven into the fabric of your life before you’re old enough to understand anything about genre, or context, or critical reception –– and had joyfully sung every lyric to every song she’d performed so far. I don’t think it occurred to me that she might play something I’ve never heard, that she had even recorded songs other than those I’d already carved into the core of my heart, but then she launched into “Left of Center” and all the breath went out of me.
If you want me
You can find me
Left of center
Off of the strip
Suzanne Vega wrote this song in 1986 for the soundtrack to Pretty in Pink –– ostensibly, it’s written from the point of view of Andie, the pert misfit heroine played by Molly Ringwald who falls in love with Andrew McCarthy’s Blane, an 80’s heartthrob with the personality of a pair of googly eyes glued to a slice of Wonderbread. She’s poor and “quirky,” he’s rich and wears white linen, they end up together despite best efforts by their friends to keep them apart, and if I just spoiled the ending for you then for god’s sake go watch it already.
I’d certainly never heard of John Hughes (and it was still a blessed two years before the coinage of the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl) when I leaned off the edge of my velvet seat and listened hard to the lyrics of this song. The cultural baggage of the Weird Girl archetype didn’t yet exist for me –– I had no context other than my burgeoning self-awareness, a few first fumbling attempts to knit “gawky grin” with “glasses” with “likes books” into a grown-up self that seemed coherent. I didn’t know much yet about the kind of self I was trying to become. I just knew I’d never heard anything so perfectly describe the position I felt myself to occupy: in the outskirts / and in the fringes / in the corner / out of the grip.
The song came early in her career, but the perspective recurs over and over in Suzanne Vega’s work and in her public persona. She’s smart, she’s strange, she’s an outsider, she’s looking hard at everything in a way that might be just a little too intense. There’s a cool detachment in the way she situates herself and her characters –– always a flinty edge, a slight spookiness, an unnameable something that sets them apart. In this song’s music video, she breaks the fourth wall a few times to stare directly into the viewer’s eyes, brows arched in a private joke, then glances down, away, back at the band or the crumbling walls of the warehouse loft where they’re playing or, my personal favorite, at a collection of photos of herself, arranged on the ground in a curious collage.
A lot of critical articles about Suzanne Vega drop the word “groundbreaking” –– mostly to claim that she paved the way for a wave of expressive young women singer-songwriters of the 90s, that her success made it possible for people like Tracy Chapman and Tori Amos and Ani Difranco to go full mainstream. I will try not to use that word, this week –– it doesn’t quite sit right with me. It seems unreasonable to write off the great women songwriters of the decades previous, to claim that no one had ever done anything like this before. Plus, it plays too well into the standard narrative that surrounds young women who write music: a dazzle-eyed, gape-mouthed awe that any young woman could create smart songs (and so often, when the brief period of public approval vanishes, belittling the emotional vulnerability and candor that make those songs smart in the first place), and subsequent positioning of the young woman in question as a unique exception because of that talent (and it’s always talent –– something innate and magical, never something created through hard work and practice). As if to say, oh, this one, she’s different. Special. Not like the other girls.
Suffice it to say that I think Suzanne Vega is exceptional. She is exceptional to music, and she is exceptional to me, because to me she was first. She broke some ground, but she’s walked where plenty of women have walked before, and will walk again. My favorite thing about this song is how, if you listen to the words, it isn’t a not-like-the-other-girls narrative at all –– I think that somehow / somewhere inside of us / we must be similar / if not the same. Sure, maybe that’s about Andie gazing at Blane, dreaming of joining the rich kid clique, but I hear something different. There’s a gentleness to it, a measured neutrality. A reminder that every margin drawn is essentially arbitrary. An invitation to redraw the borders, or to erase them entirely. A reminder that the Weird Girl is, actually, just a girl like any other, constructing herself out of the world around her –– re-imagining her role model’s pink prom dress so it suits her better, rearranging pictures of herself on the dusty floor. Remember how Taylor Swift plays both characters in the “You Belong With Me” video? It’s like that.
The fall after I saw this concert, looking for a new pair of school shoes for seventh grade, I asked my mom if we could look for “ones like Suzanne Vega had.” She acquiesced, and that’s how I ended up with my first pair of black Converse low-tops. There’s nothing special or unique about that, of course. But I had never noticed them anywhere before I saw them on Suzanne Vega performing live, and she seemed, at the time, to carry herself in a way I thought I could too. Lacing them up made me feel just a little more myself: clear-headed, ready to look at the world, standing slightly off to one side.
Tom’s Diner // Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega is not a technically impressive singer. Her own website bio describes her voice as vibratoless; there are moments in many live clips where you can see her dip her head to reach for a note at the top or bottom of her moderate range. Nonetheless, it is her voice that made her famous, her voice that reviewers take pains to describe accurately, painting strange contradictory pictures: warm, cool; smoky, smooth; plaintive, affectless. The word I always want to use is flat, though of course I don’t mean flat musically — I mean flat the way a fairytale is flat, flat like a mirror or a Tarot card or an Edward Hopper painting, something that manages cavernous depth of meaning by virtue of being all immaculate surface.
If there were a perfect song for Suzanne Vega’s voice, it is probably “Tom’s Diner.” Her original acapella version, which opens Solitude Standing, clocks in at two minutes: a first-person narrative chanted at a steady clip before fading into the iconic da da da-da da da da-da, incantatory, witchlike. In her own history of the song, written for the New York Times in 2008, she describes the effect it has on audiences:
Vega’s essay, and innumerable other pieces written during the track’s 35 years on this earth, chart the extraordinary chronology of Tom’s Diner from demo on a folk compilation album to foundational design element of the MP3 file format to countless reinventions by the likes of Aaliyah, Tupac, Drake, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears, Fall Out Boy, Lil Kim, the TV show Empire, and this Turkish comedy band. But it’s difficult to articulate why the song is as magic as it is, why it has transcended its innate smallness to develop such a rich, broad legacy.
On face, there’s nothing that should make it so remarkable. Suzanne Vega’s description of her inspiration is, frankly, indistinguishable from that of any number of liberal arts undergrads striving to produce great creative work — citing a photographer friend who told her he “saw the world through a pane of glass,” she set out to write a narrative monologue about a character who “sees all these things but can’t respond to any of it unless it relates to him directly,” a song “like a background to a Truffaut film.” The Verge’s 2015 timeline starts with a joking aside about how its lyrics “read like the sort of observational, creative nonfiction you see threaded through your Twitter timeline every day.”
The more I think about it, the more I’d argue that its magic comes from exactly that: its unremarkableness, its simplicity, its aura of detachment. “Tom’s Diner” is viral content, a blog post before blog posts, morning coffee seen through a hazy Instagram filter before Instagram’s founders were even a twinkle in someone’s eye. And, like the rapid proliferation of latté snapshots honey-coated in Lux and Valencia, everyone jumped at the chance to create their own version. To be fair, some people probably find it banal, but I’ll be honest — I can’t get through The 400 Blows without falling asleep. The small textures of other people’s lives are often fascinating, but are not by definition fascinating. You can scroll past a thousand pictures of someone’s commute or breakfast before something snags, some slant of sun or tilt of lens sparking an imaginative spiral into what being alive felt like at that moment, in that room, inhabiting that body. You look the other way from the woman who comes in shaking her umbrella, but you can’t stop noticing the one straightening her stockings in the window, hair wet from rain. The bells ring, your heart clouds with nostalgia. Something unremarkable catches the light and, for a moment, blazes with indescribable significance. The rare, random descent.
In this case, I guess, it’s Vega’s voice that acts as the light. Everything it touches becomes somehow more beautiful, more real, than it was moments before. A small ordinary story becomes a mesmerizing beat. Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy has a part that goes:
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window –
at most: column, tower… But to say them, you must understand,
oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves
ever dreamed of existing.
Perhaps Suzanne Vega is here to say: diner, corner, counter, coffee, umbrella, milk, paper, stockings. At most: the bells of the cathedral. Or, maybe: thinking of your voice.
After splitting from her label in the late 2000s, Suzanne Vega spent several years re-recording her entire back catalog of songs, as her previous master recordings no longer belonged to her. Her work culminated in a four-disc compilation called the Close-Up Series, a collection of favorites culled from previous albums and arranged in new, spare acoustic versions. Faced with the enormous task of reinventing and rereleasing her already massive body of work, she chose to sort her songs into four volumes:
Vol. 1: Love Songs
Vol. 2: People and Places
Vol. 3: States of Being
Vol. 4: Songs of Family
Given a similar task, i.e., trying to cover the entire span of her career in a week, I’ve stolen this structure from her. We’ll spend each day examining songs within these themes (although I can’t promise I’ll sort them into the same categories she does), reserving the final day for odds and ends. Tomorrow, we’ll start with love songs.
High-res
Suzanne Vega, 1980 © Brian Rose
Good morning! We’ll get started on our day of love songs soon enough, but first: here’s wishing a very happy birthday to Suzanne Vega, born this day in 1959.
Marlene On The Wall
ArtistSuzanne Vega
AlbumSuzanne Vega
Even if I am in love with you / all this to say, what’s it to you?
There are so many things at play in this song, so many fraught negotiations of sex and power and fear and conflict, but for me, the whole song comes to rest on the phrase handsome fist. Something about the smooth, warm, old-fashioned charm of the word handsome with the half-spit, half-hissed violence of fist –– it distills centuries upon centuries of sexual politics and literary conceit into a perfect summary of the ways that culture and language have bound together love and violence, elided the first soft tremors of attraction into the hollow squeeze of anxiety, smashed a whole range of human relationships from nameless edgeless uncertainties into the pulpy, all-purpose crush.
This song is violence, through and through. Observe the blood, the rose tattoo of the fingerprints on me from you. We skirt around the danger zone and don’t talk about it later. I’m not gonna talk about sex and meat and the female body, there are plenty of undergraduate comp lit classes for that, but it’s all in here, butcher shops and double entendres and the salty smell that makes your head spin. A great anecdote about Marlene Dietrich is that she never used to sweat –– whether or not that’s true, who knows, but she managed to pull off the magic trick, make it seem as though she always had complete control.
And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Control? I think it’s called my destiny / that I am changing. Reduced to jelly and bone, wriggling in the grip of feelings you’ve been taught to experience as a fight, how do you seize back any sense of it? At one point, introducing this song, Suzanne Vega joked about how, if confronted with the sort of lines Marlene got in the movies –– you have led many men to death with your body –– she would probably apologize. Now when she sings this song live, she dons a black satin top hat, tilts it low over one eye. When life throws handsome fists at you, you have to learn to cope somehow. Sometimes the sleekest way is acting like you’re able to best them at their own game.
What does it feel like? Not the song, I mean, since we’ve all been there, more or less: sometime in teenhood pretty much everyone ends up dumbstruck by the hugeness of another person’s presence, a presence so overwhelming and so undeniably important that being around it feels less like forming a relationship than it does approaching a blazing star or a black hole, drawn ever-closer to the suddenly obvious center of the universe around which all things swirl and reshape themselves, a presence that realigns the meaning of plain words like hands and body and smile, a presence that can be poured into every archetype of personhood you’ve ever learned –– you’re the jester of this courtyard with a smile like a girl’s // with the fingers of the potter, and the laughing tale of the fool –– but a presence that ultimately spills out of any framework you build to understand it, a presence whose all-consuming essence grows and grows until it swallows up everything you touch, a presence you want to swallow up you, entirely –– curl me up inside you, and let me hear you through the heat –– a presence so perfectly meaningful in the context of your life that you can only marvel at the wisdom of the universe that has brought you towards it for a specific purpose –– we strangers know each other now as part of a whole design –– although in some ways it seems like that specific purpose is not even so much to experience grown-up love as you’ve been shown it in countless movies and books and songs but instead to experience yourself in a new way, to reaffirm yourself –– yeah, now I’ve met me another spinner of strange and gauzy threads –– and, ultimately, to redefine yourself, to become a self you hardly knew you contained but a self that feels, now, looking at this person across from you, inevitable. And sure, you know that the magic of this feeling will end someday, because at seventeen you’re already a budding nihilist, but at the same time everything feels so big and perfect that despite your certainty –– you’ll blow away forever soon, and go on to different lands –– it couldn’t possibly end. Could it?
Which brings me to what I do mean: what does it feel like now? After decades? To sit onstage in a dark suit and spend four minutes strumming through the heaviest sentiment you felt at age seventeen, conjuring to life your youngest and most starry-eyed self? To confront your own teenage prescience –– you will hear yourself in song, blowing by one day –– and reckon with the ways the lived truth of that sentiment split cleanly from everything you imagined when you first wrote it down? To realize the importance of the memory of that once-colossal presence far outstrips any importance the actual person had in your life? To acknowledge you’ve transformed that memory into myth, and that the myth, actually, isn’t even about that person anymore at all, but about you? To hold in your mouth the fruit borne by seeds of self-mythologizing you sowed before you even understood what kind of tree you were planting? To do all of this publicly? To make your living by doing it? And to know that, at any moment, the person who started it all could be watching, listening, passing judgment? What on earth does it feel like?
Freeze Tag // Suzanne Vega
I was three years old the first time I kissed a boy, standing at the top of a wide silver slide, early spring, the air cool and a little damp and his cheeks faint pink from running. We had been doing a scene from Singin’ in the Rain, and I leaned forward on cue — touched my lips to his, light and quick, just enough to feel their warmth — then, in a flash, swooped down the slide and sprinted for the forgiving shadows beneath the heavy wooden playground platform, my heart thumping in my ears.
We go to the playground in the wintertime. What pulls us back there, year after year, long after our limbs have outgrown the steps and ladders, tucking knees to chest to crawl through plastic tunnels until sticky with static? Well, I mean — you get big, but they’re still for playing. When you’re five they’re for seesaws, and when you’re ten they’re for tag, and then, suddenly, they’re for we play that we’re actors on a movie screen: slouching against a steel swingset post, jutting your jaw on behalf of a nearby observer, paying close attention to the quantity of cool dense air between your face and that of the face you hope is observing you, holding very still but giddy-dizzy with the same rush you get when you leap off at the highest point in a swing’s arc, uncertain you’ll make it back to land.
I love the moments where this song holds back, like a bitten lip or a hand in your pocket, squirming, uncertain. The swings of indecision. Like, are we really doing this? You’ve never learned the proper choreography; you’ve forgotten all your lines. But a shimmer grows beneath the tense plucked guitar, strange new chords, and your focus hones to a narrow beam as you sprint to close the open space, gravel unsteady beneath your feet. It happens, but only because you make it happen, right on cue. Because you act it. You will be Bogart and I will be Bacall, all head tilt and wry whistle and surety. As though your knees aren’t shaking and not from cold. As though you’ve got any idea what it is you’re running towards.
We can only say yes now / to the sky to the street to the night, the kind of line that you could drop right into a thumping pop anthem with no problem. A line of pure adolescent abandon, of flying forward not thoughtless but pretending at thoughtlessness, of racing to catch up to the moment that feels big enough to hold you, and, fingers outstretched, snatch it from the air. How do you win at tag? By setting your sights on something and running towards it as fast as you possibly can until you’re close enough to touch it. The tickling and the trembling of freeze tag in the dark.