SENSUOUS, indeed lustful, odes to temptation are hardly what you d expect to hear sidling their way out of a Suzanne Vega CD. Nor would you get short odds on her penning a searing picture-postcard of the grit and gore of childbirth. After all, this is the woman who wrote of child abuse, the perils of fandom and the delights of Americana, diner-style, with all the wit and weariness of a native New Yorker.
She s the quintessential Hudsonite who viewed everything through Woody Allen-tinted specs, every footfall noted, dissected, and scoped; every intake of breath calibrated to delineate its effect. Vega epitomised intellectual detachment when the rest of the world was high on the diabetes-inducing saccharine of Lionel Richie and Chris de Burgh. But times have changed. The bodyclock s been ticking and Suzanne Vega s been busying herself with matters of a distinctly more domestic nature.
Which is not to say that her fifth and latest album Nine Objects Of Desire is a paean to the delights of Persil Automatic or Pampers. Thankfully, Ms Vega s retained that uncanny ability to turn her gaze far from the path signposted predictable . She did it with 99.90F in 1992, forging an unlikely (and phenomenally successful) alliance with DNA for the hip-hop oriented Tom s Diner . And now she s done it again. Colour by numbers music this is not.
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Suzanne Vega s finally back in Dublin, after a 7-year absence, and she s pulling no punches as she embarks on a long overdue tete ` tete with Hot Press. Her marriage to hotshot producer, Mitchell Froom (veteran of both Elvis Costello and Peter Gabriel s Realworld) and the birth of their daughter, Ruby, have hogged as much press attention lately as has her latest album.
Given such life-changing events, she might ve been forgiven for producing sheaves of lyric poems on the joys of night-feeds or on the upside of breastfeeding. Instead she s produced what s probably her most alluring and seductive work so far, with lust and longing very definitely in the driving seat.
To be honest, she offers, settling in to the arthritically-designed seats of the Olympia dressing room, it usually takes me a couple of years to get a perspective on anything, so the album on diapers and childbirth may still come out! Some of the songs on this album (Nine Objects Of Desire) are songs that I started to write in my twenties, but didn t get to finish until last year, when I was 36.
Yet she doesn t seem to be as consumed by motherhood as she might have been. The pace of her work (never prolific, but always steady) is the same, the musicianship is still precision-engineering at its finest, and the fact that she s doing a world tour, all suggest that she doesn t have too much time for trips to the Montessori or soiries with her local parent/toddler groups.
Well, it s so much more difficult than I ever thought it would be, she says. I mean, I ve seen my own mother go through it, but when it s your child and your body, it just consumes you. Some of it is fantastic and some of it is bewildering because it s almost like being an adolescent again where your body s not your own: it just goes off and does exactly what it wants to, so it s a whole lot different to what you d ever expect.
Rather than getting totally blissed out on desire, therefore, Nine Objects Of Desire contains one full-on-in-your-face evocation of the birth experience, one that leaves er and St. Elsewhere in the shade. It s the opener, Birth-day (Love Made Real) that plays havoc with the imagination, its images of pain and pleasure jostling for space amid the melie of the delivery room: It s a tight squeeze vice grip ice and fire hardly suggests a Laura Ashley sensibility for the raptures of confinement.
Birth is such an extreme experience, she avers, and I had never heard of a song that deals with that. I didn t want to write a cute little lullaby about it because there s nothing cuddly about the experience at all. But I also wanted to write a song that was not only about giving birth to a child, but also giving spiritual birth, or the struggle you go through to give creative birth to an album. So when I sing that song on stage, it s not meant to be literal. I don t expect the audience to think about pushing when they hear it!
Are her music and her life inextricably intertwined? Now that she s a mother, will she attempt to separate them so that her personal life doesn t become public property?
I guess it always had been, she offers, because music has always had pretty much the same function for me, and that is to soothe the children that are around me. I was the eldest of four children so I would drag them off and sing to them. Basically I was the babysitter and the entertainer. That s always been my role and it still is with my daughter.
Remarkably, Vega felt shy about exposing her newborn daughter to the perils of those distinctive vocal cords.
I was, because I thought: What if she doesn t like it? . I didn t really know her, and she didn t know me, so at first I felt completely intimidated and self-conscious. Now it s such a part of our lives, that I don t think about it anymore, and she s starting to sing too.
Is she wary of exposing her family to the public, via the lyric sheets of her albums?
Well, I would never put anything in that would be embarrassing to either my husband or my daughter, she insists, but I ve always written about things that are very personal to me, by being careful about the information I give out. I don t reveal the identities of the people, for the most part. And certainly if I had any problems, I would deal with them separately. I wouldn t write about them because that s not entertaining. To make a good song, the song is the important thing, not the purging or vomiting of your feelings.
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One of Vega s earliest and biggest hits was the poignant Luka , a tale of child abuse that skirted yet skewered the issue with uncanny precision. It used the age-old ploy of the adopted persona, telling the story from the perspective of the child who s both embarrassed and traumatised by what s happening to him. How much of Vega is in that song?
She pauses briefly, and draws in her breath. The question is not one she relishes, focusing as it does on material that stretches right back to the early days of her career. Still, she talks.
Well, that s a good question, she concedes. Most people don t ask it that way, so I get away with shielding my responses. The answer is that yes, quite a bit of it was based on my life. There was a lot of my own experience in it. It s not really something I talk to the press about too much.
Vega s uncomfortable with identifying the person who meted out this abuse to her, but she s anxious not to avoid the issue, particularly as it still occupies a large part of her psyche.
To be honest, it was a mystery to me then and it s a mystery to me now: why it happens, or what the roots of it are. Why abuse happens in some families and not in others. I can t say that I m more outraged now than I was then.
Vega is quick to dispel any suggestion that she s taking the soft option by choosing not to proclaim her victimhood from the rooftops. Different people have different ways of dealing with abuse, and hers is no A-Z of child abuse trauma counselling.
I do write about it from time to time, but I don t write about is as directly as others might, she offers. The way I see it, is that people who need to hear it, will. It s like a whistle that only dogs can hear. There are references to it in all my previous albums and Nine Objects Of Desire is the only one that doesn t carry a reference to it. So most people who need to know the information can pick it up from the music and the lyrics.
Vega maintains that not writing about abuse was almost as difficult as writing about it, because it was something she d carried around with her for so long.
The weird thing was not to be writing about it because I felt there was something missing, she says. That made me feel uncomfortable, as though I was writing about ridiculously lighthearted and flippant things. Of course I was writing about birth and death and such things!
Luka has had a fundamental effect on her music, and Vega s not shy of admitting its importance.
Whether I like it or not, that song was a defining moment in my career, she nods. It s been one of the central issues of my life so maybe it follows that it should be the defining moment in my career. I had hoped that that would not be the case, because I don t want to be a person defined by my past or my history. I want to be a person defined by my talents and my strengths, but I guess that that song s particularly powerful. And this is one of the few times I ve been able to acknowledge it publicly. Maybe this is the time for it to come out.
The openness that has heralded a massive outpouring of experiences from others who have experienced child abuse came as much of a shock to Vega as it did to such cosseted institutions as the Church and residential homes.
I was shocked over the last 10 years to see the degree to which people will talk about it, she offers, and some of it is for the better. It s come to the attention of the police and they re much better at making laws that will make a difference. But I m also shocked at the way people go on talk shows to vent their anger. I don t know that that s such a great thing.
And it s not phenomenon that s peculiar to the age we live in either, she insists.
Child abuse is one of the horrible sides of human nature that s been going on forever. You can read about it in Dickens work. I remember being a kid and reading Jane Eyre and Dickens work and feeling a strong connection to some of those characters. Of course fairy tales are full of brutality too, and I thought it was a silly romantic notion that you could identify with someone from 1500 years ago. But the fact is that that stuff has been going on forever.
What was her intention in writing Luka , if not to proclaim that she had suffered at the hands of an abuser for some time?
My intention was to define the problem, without revealing myself. I created a character, like a puppet, who was the furthest away from me at the time. I was a 24-year-old woman, and I picked a 9-year-old boy to write through. I needed that distance and I didn t want people in my face asking me about it. I m glad that I did, because I don t think I would ve been able to tolerate all those questions.
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The prospect of adopting a more direct perspective (for example, using the first instead of the third person) is one that doesn t thrill the ever-enigmatic Vega as she gets older.
As I get older I feel frustrated with that device of speaking through another character, she admits, and it s frustrating for an audience who feel I m being deliberately obtuse or aloof. They want to understand but they don t know what I m talking about. That s something that I keep slamming up against as an artist. I m not trying to be difficult. I m trying to be as straightforward as I can without being what I consider exhibitionistic, and embarrassing myself and everyone around me.
These are not things that I have a clear perspective on, even at the age of 37. It s a little bit easier to talk about. I don t know that I would have been able to have this conversation with you 10 years ago, and it s not one that I have any clear cut answers.
There are no easy answers or universal balms out there but Vega is a firm believer in channelling her energies in productive ways rather than picking at festering wounds.
I ve found that it helps to work with charities or organisations that deal with children s rights or human rights, she offers. It s a place to put those feelings that s constructive. It s the main theme of my life, really. It s not in my nature or my character to be triumphant, or to come out and reveal all . But there s still so much mystery about myself. Sometimes I look at myself and I say: why am I not more like Siniad O Connor, for example?
I look at her and she s a character that I feel I can understand. And I look at myself, and I wonder why haven t I shaved my head? Or why haven t I done these public acts of protest? But I guess I feel my role is different. It s how I began, which is, singing to my brothers and sisters. It s changing the bad thing into something good. But I feel I understand her (Siniad O Connor) in a way that I don t understand myself. I hope some day I ll understand it more.
Songwriting is one route that she s convinced will lead her wherever she needs to go to uncover those more elusive aspects of her personality.
There s always these preoccupations that you go back to, without knowing why, and you write a song, and another piece of yourself becomes illuminated. n
Suzanne Vega s latest album Nine Objects Of Desire is available on A&M Records.