Although you do have that good line in the song "Zephyr and I," "The graffiti's gone and the walls complain." Sounds sort of nostalgic, no? Well that's true. I was talking there about graffiti on the walls on Riverside Drive. So okay, so maybe there's a bit of nostalgia. Maybe I spoke with false bravado a little bit. But what I'm saying is that when the city changes I sort of adjust with it. Even though some of it's been gentrified, there's still heartache in the city enough, as it was then, so it is now. If you want to find drug addicts and people who are destitute, there certainly is that.
Do you have any good New York crime stories, from back in the old days, getting mugged, all the old rites of passage? I'm also a native New Yorker, I know what it was like. Just read the newspapers lately, there's been a lot of crazy stuff going on on the Upper West Side. You know what I'm talking about. I don't have to spell out all the different news stories, but I'm like, "Oh my god, its only a few blocks from here!" There was a double-murder-suicide across the street from me. We have all the crime we need, thank you very much.
One of your recent metaphors in your songs about NYC is in the title of the song "New York is a Woman." Can you tell us how that metaphor came about and what it means to you? Yeah, I guess since I come from New York, when I travel, a lot of people say, "Where are you from?" and I say, "New York City," and their eyes light up, and they start to tell me about the first time they went to New York or the last time they went to New York or the only time they went to New York, and how beautiful it was, and how it looked just like it was in the movies, and the steam really came up from the streets, and they get this kind of infatuated, dazzled look on their face - and usually these are men, I have to say. Women tend to give you the facts, "Oh, I went to New York once and..." fill in the blank, they're not quite as infatuated with New York as the men seem to be. So you think of New York as this sort of hard, experienced woman, a sort of femme fatale-type. Especially this one person who was from Scotland and he told me about his experience in New York, and how his business trip had turned into a couple of weeks, and how much he loved it, and it sounded like he was talking about a woman he fell in love with. That's what made me think of New York as a woman.
The song also has a sense of the experience of anonymity and insignificance while here in the city, as opposed to your typical New York song - you think of Sinatra or even Jay-Z - which is about making it big. How is that your experience of the city as well? Is that the way you feel about it? I take the subway, and I take the bus, and I walk around - so my experience of New York is not Frank Sinatra's, you know my lifestyle is not Frank Sinatra's lifestyle. I chose to some degree to live that way - so I just walk around. And I feel like I'm just another guy to New York City, in some ways. Most recently because I foolishly left my pocketbook in a cab.
And it's not coming back, is that the story? It's not come back! Right, it's like, "Look, it's so obvious" -. And so far it hasn't come back. It's swallowed up somewhere in New York.
It's probably in a garbage can in South Ozone Park right now. Either a garbage can or I keep thinking it's in a box in a police station. So I call from time to time, and they give me a list of all the things that people have turned in.
Well that sounds like a song. Yes, that's a song in waiting. Sometimes I feel celebrated by New York, and sometimes I feel like I just walk around and I live my life and I do my business and that's good too.
Certainly, I've had the experience, you walk down the street and you feel like "Boy I should do something, I should write some wonderful thing, or go to the gym more often, or something to make myself more than ordinary," because I feel like I'm just one of the millions. Well, I feel like one of the millions but I also feel like it's fine, I'm meant to report on the mood of New York as a being. So it's not as though I feel that I'm insignificant, I feel that I'm fulfilling a role - of a spy. I feel I need to be one of the people so I can report daily what's going on with humanity.
That's often the best situation for an artist to be in, with one foot in two worlds. Yeah, that's exactly how I feel.
Okay, let's get on to your latest project, what are you up to now? I've started to re-record most of my back catalog and release them over four albums. Just acoustic recordings, most of them are myself and my guitar, some of them are myself and one or two other musicians, but I'm not doing it by album, I'm releasing them by theme, so the first one is all the love songs, gathered together in a little collection. The second one will be "people, places and things." The second one will have "New York is a Woman" and "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" and "In Liverpool" and "Ironbound" and "Calypso" and "Casper Hauser's Song." Then the third one is "states of being," so those are the more internal songs like "Blood Makes Noise" or "Cracking," maybe "Solitude Standing." Then the fourth one, all the songs that didn't fit into any of those categories seem to fit under the category of "songs of family." So that will cover most of my catalog. So I'm releasing it and seeing who is out there.
Doing a four-cd re-recording is a huge amount of work. First of all, what songs aren't going to be on these four cd's and why? Are there ones where you said, "Oh my god, I really have no desire to take a look at that thing again." Most of them are songs either people don't ask for ever - ever - in 25 years of recording, songs that no one has ever asked for. I can't even remember what they are, because no one asks for them. And when I revisit them myself, I find that I can't make them work in simple form, they were so much based on the production that I can't even access them as a simple song.
Can you give an example or two? You know if I do that, that one or two people will write in...
That's why I'm making you do it! "Why not? I've been waiting for years!" I know. I'm not doing "No Cheap Thrill," not doing "Men in a War." For awhile we did that live, and it seemed to work, but lately every time we play it really gets on my own nerves, and I feel like I was aiming for something I didn't quite get. So that's probably why I may not record it. But the thing is, it's such a fluid project, and if people do clamor and say, "Hey, we do want 'Men in a War,'" I could release it, and put it up on the website, people can download it, pay 99 cents or whatever you want. You can fill it in later. It's the kind of project I hope will go on for a long period of time, and I'll keep adding things to it, keep re-orchestrating, send it out for remixes, if people wanted to remix and send me their own versions with the way they think the production should be, we could create a website for that. So I kind of see it as a fluid thing, it will kind of keep going forever. Until I'm not around to run it anymore.
What is the specific motivation for this project and this giant re-working of your back catalog? Well, let's see. I was talking to Dar Williams, and we were talking about the idea of re-recording - rerecording songs in general. Because once you're not with a record label anymore, at least in my case - I was with A&M for a very long time, made some really good records with them, was very happy with it, but the fact is that they are not re-releasing those old albums anymore. If anybody wants to get 99.9 it's very hard to find it. They're not making it. It's like out of print.
That's also true for your debut album, Suzanne Vega, from 25 years ago, is that not correct? Or the last one on Blue Note. You can't get those in real CD form. Everything else is sort of falling away. And I didn't want to go back and argue with them and fight with them and say, "Why won't you do it?" So I said to my manager, why don't I re-record all the favorite songs that everybody likes? The songs like "Gypsy," "Queen and the Soldier" ... But in the meantime, a few years ago, I had mentioned that I liked the idea of re-releasing the songs not by year and not by album, but by theme, because that's the way I think of them. Lots of times when I'm singing live, I'll take a bunch of songs that I consider love songs, or a bunch of songs about family, or a bunch of songs about mental health, and put them altogether in a set. And that makes you see the songs in a different way, and you can kind of see the themes that have run through all the work, it's just a different way of presenting the material. I didn't want to get nostalgic, and say, "Oh I loved that first album, I wish you would do that, without all the production," I didn't want to go on that sort of nostalgic trip. I'm more interested in just presenting the songs in this new way. And it means that people who want to hear all the love songs might hear a few things they've never heard before.
So the way you put that, there's a large business aspect to it. Is there a personal element as well? Obviously you were married to the man who produced two of your albums. Is there any personal reclaiming going on as well? No, not so much with reclaiming it from Mitchell [Froom]'s productions. I really loved Mitchell's productions, I still love them, I still am very proud of them. Those in some ways are the definitive versions. I've redone them over time because sometimes I don't have the money to bring the production on the road with me. So I do the production, either myself or my bass player, or myself and Gerry Leonard on guitar, so I'm not so much reclaiming it from Mitchell. What most people don't realize is those productions were very much a team effort, with every producer I've worked with. Those productions came out with my full consent, with my full...not just consent, but I was in there too, with the mixes, while we were mixing, while we were recording, I was there either cheering everybody on or saying, "Let's try this." It wasn't as though he somehow came along and corrupted them.
Let's talk a little about the role of self-exposure. You've lived a very public life - yes - in an unusual way. The album Songs in Red and Gray, for instance, contains songs about your divorce. There are moments on that album where I flinch when I listen - because the songs are so intensely personal. I'm sorry.
Well, it's because it's real. What do you think drives, for you, that deep self-exposure? Well that's really interesting because for so long I heard I had this "wry observational tone," and that I never revealed anything of myself. And I have to say, the truth is somewhere in between. Thinking to myself, if you think those are personal you should see the ones I didn't put out, you should see the other stuff I don't release! The ones I put out were sort of middle-of-the-road about problems that I felt other people could relate to. A song like "Soap and Water," to me, is not a judgmental song or a blaming song. I felt that I wrote about it in a kind of clean and honest way. And a lot of people could identify with it, with a divorce situation where there's a child.
That's precisely why it can be so difficult to listen to. Yeah, I know - but I didn't fingerprint anybody in it, I didn't describe people as they are physically, other than metaphorically. And I put them on the album because I thought these were good songs, they're good enough. And that's ultimately the litmus test for me, "Is it a good song?" And if I felt, if I listen to the song and feel that it stands up, and that other people can understand something of it, then I release it and then I let it go.
And that opens up a kind of feedback loop doesn't it? Is there some kind of liberation from the honesty, when you're honest about your own feelings does it call forth a similar reaction on the part of someone else? Yeah maybe, there's an element. I always feel that way when I'm facing an audience. There's something real that happens. The audience comes in expecting something, I come on stage to present something, and something happens in between myself and the audience, and that's real and that changes every night, depending on who the audience is, what their expectations are - it's part of the thrill for me.
How did the show go at Lincoln Center? It was great! Although my husband Paul complained that I shouldn't have - I kept saying how well-behaved the audience was.
Yes you did. [Laughs] Oh, so you were there? Sometimes if a show has been sold out weeks in advance in New York City, there's like a racket that happens when you come onstage. A couple times I've had that happen. And last night was not like that. It was very quiet, very respectable. And I could see why when I looked into the audience, and saw some sequins shining here and there. People dressed up. People are not going to come in and be rowdy, and frantic, screaming, or jumping up and down, or even coming up into my face, which happens at other venues.
Yeah, Lincoln Center I don't think is the venue for rowdiness. Yeah, I don't care how many gin-and-tonics or martinis you have you're not going to come screaming down the aisles.
So when are you going to play some shows in Brooklyn? I did last August, I came out to the - Mason? there's like a venue in one of the Mason Temples - that was really interesting. I guess I will come out to Brooklyn at some point.
Yeah, you have to do that. So the album coming out is called Suzanne Vega Close-Up, Love Songs. There are some love songs that are not on this, and others that maybe are not so obvious that are, "Small Blue Thing," or "Head Shots." Can you explain what governed the selection of the songs, and what you think constitutes a love song? Well, what's obvious to me is maybe not obvious to everyone, or what's obvious to everyone isn't obvious to me.
Well, I would think "The World Before Columbus" is a straight love song. "If your love were taken from me..." is the first line, dot dot dot. But that's not there. It's not there, and the reason it's not there is because it was written for my daughter. And so I would put that into the category of family. And also because there were other songs that come before it. Most of the songs in the "Love Songs" were written for men I was in love with at one time or another, usually at the time of writing the song. Or else later on. Usually there's a man involved, in one case a woman, in "Stockings" there's sort of a slight crush on somebody. So there's love or an infatuation or some kind of situation like that. So to me that makes it a love song, that category of song.
So a large part of it is the question of where it comes from, rather than just what its external form is. Yeah, who it was written for.
On this album, which song excites you the most right now, which of the re-recordings? I really like the version of "If You Were In My Movie."
Could a man write a song like that? Dressing up a guy, putting him in priest's clothes, or detective's clothes... Are you kidding? Of course a guy could write a song like that. They have all the time! Think of a bunch of Elvis Costello songs where he dresses women up in different things, casts them in different roles. Women are always put into different roles in men's songs. The angel, the goddess, the prostitute, there's all kinds of roles women play in men's songs.
Okay, okay. Anything else you want to pass along to us? That maybe at some point it would be fun to have a sort of situation where I could get the whole catalog on my website and you can have special sorting software, so you could create your own list of what your love songs, what you consider love songs to be, I'd love to figure out a way to do that. Then you could burn your own playlist, add your own artwork, and have your own Suzanne Vega production. Maybe in the not-so-distant future we'll figure out a way to do that.
