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Most of this transcript is from an interview that was done in New York and was interspersed with the performance at the El Rey in Los Angeles. The text in {dark blue and braces} was spoken on stage.
[Title: Suzanne Vega live at the El Rey]
[Stockings]
[Caramel]
[Small Blue Thing]
The thing you learn as a kid growing up in New York City is that beauty is not the way it is pictured in books or even in children's books. What I learned growing up is that you find beauty in things that are a little strange or... For example, right now I live in a very industrial neighborhood in New York, so for me there's a beauty in simple little things like grass coming up between the cracks of the sidewalk or... There's broken glass all the time in my neighborhood and there's a certain bleakness about it that which you come to really love if you grow up in landscape like that. It's what you know and eventually it becomes what you love and you find beautiful. And so, that's for me what I am always finding a point view that's forgotten or a point of view that's not obviously beautiful or even not obviously interesting when you first look at it. I've always written stories from the time that I was about 5 or 6 years old, way before I started playing the guitar. Although I think I probably also wrote little tunes at that point, but it was nothing conscious, it was nothing that I remember. So I basically always wrote first. It's probably because my step-father is a novelist and a short story writer and... He loved it when I would write and tell stories, so he really encouraged me in that direction. And it was a household where we talked about books and we talked about ideas. It was a fairly theatrical family as well. So, but, on the other hand I don't think I would be happy only writing novels or short stories or poems. To me there is something, I need the guitar and I need the music sometimes to bring the story out. Sometimes it doesn't really matter whether it's the lyrics that comes first or it's the music that comes first. Usually it's how it all sits together. Sometimes you need the melody before the story will come out. You need the, you need music to form an atmosphere that the story can come out into. Sort of like if you have a cat with a blanket, for example, you lay the blanket down and the cat will eventually find it's way over to it. Whereas if you take the cat and throw it onto there it won't stay. You need to have the atmosphere first and then the song sort of comes out into the atmosphere that it feels comfortable in. And that's how I think of the songs they're like creatures with their own natures and their own wills that you have to coax out of yourself.
[Marlene on the Wall]
{So, that song was written about twelve or thirteen years ago. And it was written for the actress Marlene Detrich. That's the Marlene that I am talking about in that song. And the very first time that I ever saw Marlene Detrich was one night when I was watching television, I was apartment sitting in the East Village in New York City which is where I'm from. (Thank you, no need to applaud, really). So there I was and I turned on the TV set and it was one of these old sets that take a while to warm up. So I turned on the knob and you get the little tiny dot in the middle of the screen. And I hear this voice saying, this man's voice saying, "You have lead many men to death with your body." [Crowd woops] That's what I said. I was like "Alright!". [Suzanne laughs] Because I didn't see anything, you know, I didn't know who the guy was, who he was talking to. And for a split second I had this fantasy, what if someone came to my door and said that to me? What would I say? And I thought that I would probably apologize. I would probably be like "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I you sure it was me? It might have been, you know, so-and-so down the hall." So, I was curious to know what who ever he was talking to would say. Of course right then the picture came on and there's Marlene Deitrich's beautiful face in close-up. And her answer, of course, which is the only proper and logical one "Give me a kiss". [Audience whops] Alright!}
So right from that moment I was just hooked I watched the rest of the movie. I became a huge Marlene Deitrich fan. And that photograph is one that someone had given me, back in the days when I was hanging out at Folk City. They gave it to me because they knew that I was a fan of her's. I had it framed and had it on my wall. The song is written from the point of view of the photograph of Marlene Deitrich looking down into my bedroom at that point when I was in my early twenties.
[Fat Man and Dancing Girl]
{So I know that you are standing there asking yourselves, "Who is Billy Pearl, the international fun boy?" Billy Pearl was a band leader in the 30's. And he toured the Vaudeville circuit in the Midwest. Thank you very much. [audience cheers] No, and my grandmother was his drummer, in his band. He had an all girls band, he had a series of all girls band actually, bands. And one of them was called "The Melody Maker's Lady's Orchestra" and that was the one that my grandmother was the drummer for. So, now you know.}
I never new my grandmother, at all. By the time that I even knew of her existence she had been dead many years. I met my father, my natural father, for the first time ten years ago. So, I was very surprised when I met my father, because he had sent me in the mail a packet of picture, of photographs, of my grandmother. So I was shocked, because I always thought that I had chosen this lifestyle for myself and I that was being original, I was the only musician in my family that I grew up in. So I thought I had chosen it for myself and then all of the sudden, I find out that my grandmother had the same lifestyle I had, but it was fifty years earlier. She toured for most of her life. She gave up my father for adoption. And she had four children during the depression. And she would put them in an institution from time to time, while she continued with her touring. So, I never knew her. But, I felt strange looking at the photographs, because I felt some how it was the idea to be a musician must have been in my blood some how, without my realizing it, because I acting out the very same lifestyle that she had had. Of course the main difference I hope to make in my life is that I want to keep my child and my children (if I have anymore children) with me and not have to give them up so I can continue my career. But that's been a repeating pattern in my life of being separated from one parents at an early age. And in fact that's kind what, the secret heart of the song the World Before Columbus, is the fear that I would be separated from Ruby somehow. That's what's really behind that song as well.
[World Before Columbus]
{This next song is about a romance using the language of poker. I'm sure that you will have no problem with it.}
[No Cheap Thrill]
Woman on the Tier came about because I got a fax from Tim Robbins, who was looking for people to write music inspired by the film he was working on called "Dead Man Walking". So even though it's not in the film, it is inspired by film. He sent me a rough-cut of the film to watch. But I was really inspired more by the book, which I went out and bought, because I wanted to see what kind of language Sister Helen Prejean would use herself to describe her own feelings and her own situation. That's what excites me is language. So when I bought the book I was very excited because she's a beautiful writer. And there's the one moment where she come to the jail for the very first time and she's about to meet the killer that she has been writing letters to. I could see, I could feel from reading the book I could feel her language change. I could feel that she must have been very tense in that situation, she must have been feeling a lot of anxiety, because her language became very poetic, her language started to rhyme and had certain kinds of rhythms here and there. And so, writing the song was fairly simple, it took me about a day to go in and edit what was already there, so almost all the words are her words, they're just rearranged over this intense rhythms. And again I like that rhythms, because to me it had all that clanging and the atmosphere that you would find in a jail, where the doors are slamming closed and there's a lot of metal and people shouting and that was the kind of atmosphere that I wanted for that song.
[Woman on the Tier]
[Blood Makes Noise]
{And now I'd like to introduce the band: We have on keyboards, Mitchell Froom. On guitar, Steve Donaly. On bass, Mike Visceglia. On drums Pete Thomas.}
I'm puzzled mostly be the idea that for some reason, I was a pure folk singer who changed my style. I don't that's really true at all. I think that, I never have been a pure folk singer. The root is folk, because of the acoustic guitar, which I really love, and because of the story telling aspect. But I have never tried to present myself as a pure traditional folk singer. I don't singe songs from the Appalachian Mountains. I'm not a historian, I don't go back and sing the old songs. Which is basically what folk music is. I think that I'm a songwriter that writes in different styles, a stylist in a sense. I don't pretend to be a great singer. I feel that my strength is really in the lyrics and in the writing. So that's still how I see myself. In my own point of view I don't think my style has changed that much, that drastically. The sounds have changed a little bit. But, for me, my style is very consistent. The things that I'm attracted, the words that I use are pretty consistent for the twenty years that I have been writing songs. The folk image is still a bit of a puzzle to me. It's not one that I fight with, because I have a lot of affection for the scene, for the folk scene, for the people that are part of it and politically my sympathies are with the people that are involved in the folk scene.
[Luka]
[Birth-day]
There's no Tom's Diner, but there's a Tom's Restaurant. And of course you know "diner" sings better than "restaurant", so that's why I changed it to "diner". It's up on 112th Street and Broadway, which most people know by now that that's where it is. I have heard that Tom's Diner is also, you know, the place where is say "RESTAURANT", I think that the signs are the same ones that they use for the Sienfeld show. I always thought that was kind of a funny thing because now it has become like a symbol of New York, because back 15 years ago when I wrote the song it was just a neighborhood joint. I used to eat breakfast there when I was going to school and before I would go to work. It's a really, at least it was back when I wrote the song, it was a very ordinary place, a very sort of New York place, nothing fancy, not picture perfect, not even terribly atmospheric, just like regular a joint. And that's why I really liked it. The main about this person whose sing this song, the narrator of the song, is that he's not involved in anything he's looking at, even the woman that looks in through the window he thinks that she flirting with him, but it turns out that she's only fixing her stocking. So in a sense he's isolated from everything that he's looking at. He looks through the paper, he sees that there's someone, that was an actor, but he doesn't know the actor and so he skips over it to the horoscope, which does concern him. So it was a little bit of a portrait that I was trying to draw using that device. And at the very end there's just this one memory, the memory of someone's voice and the bells ringing and the memory of a midnight picnic (which, I actually did have a midnight picnic with someone on the step of the cathedral at the St. John the divine. I think it was about 12:30 and we had this little, brought our food sat on the steps and we ate it. It was a very romantic moment for me in my own life.) So I picked these different moments out and I made a little storyline. That's one thing, I think, that people miss sometimes, it's not just a song about breakfast, it's a song about being disconnected or feeling alienated and then this sort of wistful moment back to when you really felt connected to someone when you were in love with them. So that's really what the song is about.
[Tom's Diner]
This transcript © William Andrews 2001.
The content of the text is © Suzanne Vega/Waifersongs Ltd.
1996.