Her Name's Not Luka

Her Name's Not Luka

by Benjy Eisen

“I think it’s good that I have songs that everybody knows,” admits Suzanne Vega. “It could have been the other way around,” she says, “where nobody had heard of those two songs and then I’d have a lot smaller of an audience.”

The two songs she’s talking about are “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” and indeed, everybody does in-fact know them. They were unlikely hits for Suzanne Vega back in the late ’80s. “Luka” is an arresting examination of child abuse told through third person narrative and wrapped around a clever pop melody. “Tom’s Diner” is a tune that you’ve had stuck in your head and have probably whistled once or twice, even if you don’t know the lyrics (“I am sitting in the morning/at the diner on the corner/I am waiting at the counter/for the man to pour the coffee”). “If it gets stuck in my mind I guess I can count on it getting stuck in someone else’s,” Vega offers.

Both of those songs originated from Suzanne Vega’s second album, Solitude Standing, released in 1987. On September 25 of this year, Vega released her seventh (her first in five years), Songs In Red And Gray. In many ways, the album is a throwback to the type of music she was making in the ’80s, before a series of “Tom’s Diner” remixes pushed her away from her folksinger roots. Yet in other ways, Songs In Red And Gray shows her progress as an artist and as a songwriter. This subtle contradiction is accentuated by a series of conceptual contrasts. There’s the album title for example, which names the colors red and gray. Red represents matters of heart while gray is the province of the mind; emotions vs. thought. Then there’s the music itself — Vega plays these songs on an acoustic, with intimate vocals, while underneath drum samples click and clatter. “There’s the warmth of the acoustic guitar and the colder aspects of the techno side of some of the songs,” Vega agrees, “which I think works out pretty well.”

Last year, she started returning to the Songwriter’s Exchange, a weekly workshop led by her friend Jack Hardy. But the songs she brought there showed a new approach to her songwriting — that of the first person. These were no longer other people’s stories. These were hers. Yet, the antidotes are still there for everyone. “To me a song like Penitent, is is about trying to find your place in the world … that to me is a pretty universal feeling.”

Lyrically “there’s a lot of memories on the album,” she says, “a lot of looking back, and I feel that it’s a very romantic album.” Yet, for all it’s looking back, Vega herself is moving forward.

All this change and motion — both backwards and forwards — was brought on by a series of events in the past few years, which saw Vega separating from her husband while raising their daughter. She fired her staff, and pretty much just threw the pieces up into the air. When they reconfigured, it wasn’t too far off from where she had first started.

“I feel that my life goes around in spirals,” she explains, “Yeah, not so much circles but spirals. They kind of go around but you end up in a sort of higher place than you were before. And that’s always been true.”

Suzanne Vega will be performing at The Whitaker Center on Thursday, November 1. Tickets are available by calling 214-ARTS or at The Whitaker Center Box Office.

During my conversation with her, we started discussing the tragic events of September 11. Suzanne lives in New York City. What follows is a direct transcript:

Let’s talk about September 11. From an artist’s perspective, how do you deal with it?

Well as an artist you look at the whole scene and you think, ‘how the hell can I even think about writing about something that is so huge and in one way is so personal because it’s the streets that I know so well and it’s the city that I know so well?’ It’s even made more personal because my friend Jack [Hardy] who I mentioned to you earlier who is the songwriter, lives down there. He lives in the Village and his brother died in the attack. His brother was a chef on the 101st floor and Jack was walking towards the building when he saw the building fall down. So all of us were just completely stunned by the events and stunned by the fact that Jack was there to see it and the things that he saw and the bodies and the dust and I mean it’s just unbelievable. So it really hit our whole community really hard. There’s a lot of the songwriter’s from the Songwriter’s Exchange that have been writing songs about it, and I haven’t been able to yet just because I haven’t been able to think about what words I would use or what scene, how to go about it, but I think it’s definitely something that we’ll all be writing about for years to come… It’s just stunning… People really all over the country want to talk about it, and they want to know about it, and even though we don’t always discuss it on the stage, afterwards when I talk to the audience, people will ask what were you doing and what are your impressions and people want to hear what’s happening. It’s kind of an unusual situation where New York has the sympathy and the spotlight of the country. It’s really something. Even a month and a half later it’s still kind of hard to get your mind around the whole thing. It’s hard to conceive that someone actually plotted this and thought about it and actually executed this plan and killed all these people.

Will it affect what you do in the stage show at all?

No. I’ve watched other people perform and I realized that once you start performing you kind of create your own world. I think this Thursday I’m playing in New York City and I will probably sing “St. Clair” which is the Jack Hardy cover. I’ll probably sing that in memory of Jeff Hardy. Maybe we’ll end up taking that on the road, depending on how it goes and how it feels to do that. But for the most part I feel that I’m just going out to do a show and that it’s not necessary for me to talk about the political situation. And if I can offer somebody an hour and a half of relief then that’s what I’m happy to do and we end up discussing it sort of after the show.