At the height of her popularity about two years ago, with ”Luka” riding high on the pop charts, Suzanne Vega was taken to task by another prominent singer-songwriter, Sinead O`Connor.
”I`m not an admirer of folk music, of Suzanne Vega,” O`Connor told Musician magazine. ”All that stuff is wishy-washy as far as I`m concerned.” ”Wishy-washy” wasn`t the worst of it. Some critics referred to Vega`s style as ”new waif,” as if she were some sad little folk singer.
It`s a description that didn`t fit the Suzanne Vega who arrived in Chicago recently for a day-long visit, paving the way for the release of her new album, ”Days of Open Hand” (A&M), and a national tour that brings her to the Riviera Theatre on Monday.
She`s about 5-feet 6-inches tall, slender, almost lanky, her red hair cropped fashionably short around her angular ivory cheeks and dimpled chin. She listens attentively, speaks in measured but authoritative sentences, and laughs easily.
”It bothers me that people think of me as dealing with only one emotion,” she says. ”So they think they`re going to meet someone melancholy or sad. But I`m a fairly resilient person.”
Her words are reflected in the song ”Book of Dreams” from her new album:
The spine is bound to last a life / Tough enough to take the pounding
/ Pages made of days of open hand
”I was reading Studs Terkel`s book `Working` and was fascinated by the bookbinder`s story of what he does,” Vega says. ”I love books, the look, the feel of them. So I took those elements to frame the song and went on this imaginary trip of `What do I wish?`
”It was a weird feeling to realize I could write a song that was that optimistic.”
At 19, Vega wasn`t optimistic at all about her future as an aspiring performer. She had a talent for writing vivid songs without choruses or melodies, but who would want to hear them? Then in 1979 she saw Lou Reed perform the painfully stark ”Caroline Says II” in concert, and found she was not alone.
She began playing Greenwich Village clubs, where folk was languishing. It had become music for watering houseplants or sipping coffee; the electricity of the Dylan-charged `60s was gone.
Vega, however, ”saw in folk music the same alternative values as punk had.”
”I still have that attitude,” she says. ”It was exciting to say, `Yes, I am a folk singer, but I`m not what you think.` I`d like to think I helped shove the definition of folk along.”
Not without encountering some resistance, however.
”I`d hear stuff like, `She`s not very happy, no one can sing along to her songs, and she has really, really short hair.”`
But that subversive sensibility made Vega`s self-titled debut a 1985 critics` favorite. It presented Vega as a woman very much in control of her destiny, even when she was most vulnerable:
With my knees against my mouth
I am perfectly round
I am cool and smooth and curious
I never blink
I am turning in your hand
”It was a love song,” Vega said, referring to ”Small Blue Thing.”
”But most people thought it was self-referential, self-defining.”
It`s easy to understand why. Vega`s writing is often intentionally oblique, occasionally surreal. Listeners have to work to find her songs`
meaning, and once they do, they`re often startled.
Such was the case with ”Luka,” about an abused child. Not exactly your typical day-at-the-beach song, it soared to No. 3 on the pop charts in the summer of 1987 and helped turn her second album, ”Solitude Standing,” into a 3-million seller.
”It was a song I`d written in 1984 but didn`t record because I felt that no one would understand it, and that even if they did, they wouldn`t like it,” she says. ”When it became a hit, I was extremely dubious. I was worn out from touring at the time, so it was as if part of my life was happening without me.”
The success of ”Luka” was partially attributable to its arrangement, which was far more lush and ”pop” sounding than the sparely produced tunes on her first album. Vega vividly remembers the day the song came together in the studio.
”I was putting together a band, and we had been auditioning keyboard players when in walked this guy with such a crabby attitude that it immediately caught my interest,” Vega says with a laugh.
”He could play piano very well and improvise, but what really struck me was that he had worked out this really great arrangement for `Luka.”`
The pianist was Anton Sanko, who not only got the job, but later became Vega`s live-in boyfriend and coproducer.
His shimmering, low-key arrangements give ”Days of Open Hand” an airy, open-ended quality in keeping with Vega`s latest batch of songs.
”All the songs from my past were on the first two albums. The well was dry. So I suddenly had to say, `What`s interesting to you right now?”` she says. ”I had to write from a more present-day perspective.”
”A lot of what I do comes from having a plan,” Vega says. ”My plan has worked so well that it`s almost frightening. First it was to quit my day job so I could concentrate on singing. Then it was to make an album, then put together a band . . .”
”Days of Open Hand” looks ahead, a welcoming gesture to the infinite possibility of the future.
For that reason, it has even less connection to the folk tradition than Vega`s previous albums. It is more like a cycle of dreams, many of which are imbued with an eerie but abiding sense of calm.
In ”Tired of Sleeping,” for example, a child awakes from a series of nightmares and, in a startling role reversal, begins reassuring her mother that everything will be all right.
”I don`t know why, but that song still makes me cry when I sing it,”
Vega says. ”It`s a song in which the child knows that her dreams are bad, but she`s trying to tell her mom that they`re not that bad and that she should go back to bed.”
Several songs, such as ”Rusted Pipe” and ”Big Space,” deal with the mystery of the creative process, as if Vega were trying to make sense of the magic that enables her to write a classic such as ”Tired of Sleeping” in only 45 minutes.
”My biggest fear is that one day I won`t be able to speak or communicate,” she says. ”It`s a feeling I used to get as a child that I called the `deep freeze,` a state where I couldn`t speak because I was so afraid. Anything could happen to me then because I couldn`t defend myself. I still dread that feeling.”
But with the album-closing ”Pilgrimage,” Vega finds an almost Zen-like peace in not knowing all the answers, of not knowing her destination:
Travel. Arrival / Years of an inch and a step/ Toward a source / I`m coming to you / I`ll be there in time
It`s a lesson learned during the days when ”Luka” was turning her days upside down.
”I used to worry that the only reason so many people liked me was because I`d become so bland, that I`d lost some part of my character,” she says. ”I wondered, `Do I like this?`
”And I got momentarily caught up in these destructive, competitive thoughts about how well my record was doing. But I came to realize that somebody is always doing better than you, there`s always someone ahead of you on the charts. Better to go write a new song.”
