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Suzanne Vega [Guest]: Sure.
H: Is, is the I in your songs always you? Or are you frequently creating characters who speak in the first person? And, and what, what problems do you run into in situations like that?
SV: Um, well the thing is it more , it is both really. Sometime I'll create a character and the obvious example I guess is Luka. Which is written from the point of view of a nine year-old boy who is abused by his parents. Ah um, and the thing is uh, I mean in that particular case there was a problem. Because there was a boy in my building named Luka who live upstairs from me. Who was not abused, um, at all. [Audience laughs] Um, and I never expect the song to become popular. So it never occurred to me, to, uh. He was, he was nine. And I think uh, I, I meet him. This is confidential. [Audience laughs] Yeah. Uh, [Suzanne laughs] because, uh, we had the same last name. His name was Luka Vega and I had received his Junior Scholastic's. [Audience laughs] So, um [Suzanne laughs], he rang my buzzer one day and I, and I opened the door. And I said "Oh, YOUR Luka Vega". And I said, "My name is SUZANNE Vega and we have the same last name". And he looked at me like, "Yeah big deal I need to go upstairs and use the bathroom." So, um, that was really the only time I ever spoke to him. But after the song became popular; I heard from my old roommate who said that, his, uh, he had come back to my old apartment with a girl when I guess that he must have been fifteen or sixteen by the time the song was really big. And he asked my roommate, "Would you please, tell this girl that Suzanne Vega really did live here." So he DID know that I lived downstairs and he was, he was not, he didn't seem traumatized by it. He was using it to, um, get girlfriends as far as could see, [audience laughs] I think this [Suzanne laughs] you know. But, you know I was very...
H: "I'm, I'm THE Luka"
SV: Yeah, "I'M the Luka of the song." But, uh, you know it was not something that I had expected, I didn't expect it to, to become big.
H: You were taking his name and perhaps, you know, his physical characteristics and creating this whole other story. Plugging that in to it?
SV: Yeah. I mean the thing about all the song that I write, too, is that there is always a connection to me, in my person life somehow or an other. And those are the things that I never talk about or reveal. But, um, you know it is not just a question of looking through the newspaper and finding abstract, um, you know, I, I don't do that. I, I write from the feelings that I have and the things that I see and the, and the things that move me and uh. So, there's, there's always a, a connection, it's never just abstract.
H: Hmm, Would you do it for us? [Audience Yeah's, clapping]
SV: Okay. [Suzanne starts to play]
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