33 f Suzanne’s Realm
Suzanne Vega would rather her work was refined than prolific. She talks songwriting with Tim Chipping.
zling and intricate. You could trace the lines of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed but the unique and assured identity of songs like Luka, Tom’s Diner and The Queen And The Soldier was apparent. Suzanne was a once-in-a-generation songwriter. I’m thankful it was my generation.
W This is, in part, an interview with
Suzanne Vega about her new album Tales From The Realm Of The Queen Of Penta- cles. But it’s also a masterclass in song- writing from an artist who’s climbed inside their craft and worked out which wires go where.
It’s been seven years between your
last album Beauty & Crime and this one. What’s the timescale from first thought to finished song?
“It can be a year. It can be six years.
There’s one song called Jacob And The Angel, and I started working on that back in 2006. So I wrote it all down as far as I could see it and then sort of threw it back on the pile of songs.”
“And I think in anybody’s lifetime things repeat themselves. So if you keep all those scraps eventually you realise that they’re connected in different ways. You might think you have two songs with sepa- rate ideas then suddenly you realise that one is the chorus for a song that you have all the verses for. So I allow for all that and I like it.”
Do you ever worry that you’re not prolific?
“I have let go of a lot of that. When I was young I was part of a songwriting group led by a friend of mine named Jack Hardy who firmly believed in a song a week. So you’d end up with 52 songs at the end of the year. And that seems like insanity to me. I sift and strain and edit and condense so the stuff that ends up squeaking through is really refined.”
Are there songs on this album that remain a mystery to you, or is much of what you do pure craft?
“Different songs are different per- centages; some 75 percent craft, 25 per- cent mystery. Or some are 90 percent mys- tery and ten percent craft. It depends on how they surface.”
“Jacob And The Angel is still a bit of a mystery to me because that image started to appear some time back and I was like, ‘Why does this move me?’ And I still can’t
hen Suzanne Vega emerged from her Green- wich Village folk scene cocoon in 1984, her songs were fully formed, daz-
Photo: George Holz
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