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quite put my finger on what it’s about. But that in and of itself is about wrestling with a mystery – something visits you and you’re compelled to wrestle with it all through the night and in the morning there’s this surrender to the next part. So I was taken with that idea.”


“Some of the other songs… there was quite a bit of crafting. Horizon (There Is A Road) – I was really stuck after the first verse, to the point where I had to draw a picture for myself. There is a road beyond this one… So I was imagining a parallel road, sort of like the Long Island Expressway and the Sunrise Highway. I was thinking there was an exit where you have to get off and join this other road. So I drew the two roads and suddenly they met and turned into the horizon. And once I saw the little drawing I realised that the road beyond this one isn’t the one parallel, it’s the one on the horizon. And that clarified everything for me. And when I saw the horizon I thought, ‘Václav Havel said, “God is the horizon.” So why don’t you figure out what he meant by that?’ Everything clicked and fell into place.”


Here’s my A-level student question: Is inspiration a well or a spring?


“Hmm… let’s examine our metaphors. It keeps coming and you have to channel it, so it’s more of a spring. That’s how I see it. Inspiration… you can’t really keep it in one place like a well; then it gets murky and stagnant. It keeps coming but you have to have a bucket to put it in. By bucket I mean like your iPhone or your notebook. And it has to know you’re listening. If it’s bubbling along merrily and you’re not listening it goes away.”


Is it still important to you to write songs that haven’t been written before?


“Yes, although I make more allowances now. But it’s still important for me, and that’s why it’s so great that we have Google. Because if I’m walking down a hallway and suddenly I hear a phrase in my mind that says, ‘Don’t uncork what you can’t contain’, I’ll think, ‘Is that an old Irish proverb or something?’ Then I’ll go online and I’m like, ‘No, it appears no one has ever said this before.’ And then I feel confident about riffing with that as an idea. So I like to think I’m still doing something that might be con- strued as being somewhat original.”


Another of the new tracks, Song Of The Stoic, you’ve described as being about the protagonist in Luka if he grew up to be a man who worked as a roadie. How serious were you that this is the continued story of Luka?


“I meant it absolutely. I was sitting there on that day and the arc of the song was between a person who is eighteen and now he’s at the end of his life. And I was thinking of the journey of his body, and the pain of his childhood, and the fact that he’s near the end of his life and wants to feel a kind of release from his body.”


“There are so many different types of people that you meet on the road. Some of them have never drunk and some of them went through a wild crazy time and now they’re in rehab. The wish to transcend the body is such a human thing, especially if you have pain in your life. That’s why people take drugs, it’s why they drink, have wild sex… We’re all trying to transcend our bodies. So for those men who don’t have that release I could imagine that you see the last horizon and you just go for it. You imagine it as a great sense of peace. So that all occurred to me that afternoon and I just wrote it all down.”


You’re one of those performers who has signature songs that everyone wants to hear, like Luka. Do you have a troubled rela- tionship with those songs?


“Not really. I know everyone gets sick of them and wants to say ‘I’ve done other stuff’. And there’s this embarrassing moment, which I had a couple of years ago, where I was at a venue and there was this man standing there with his eight year old son. And he’s really excited to see me and he says to his son, ‘Look, there’s Suzanne Vega. She’s from the ’80s.’”


“But I have to put all that aside. Because at the end of the


show I sing Luka. And I can still pull up everything that made me write the song. And I still feel it connecting with the audience. Child abuse is still happening. People are still coming to grips with things that happened to them. It was a pop song for a minute but the issues still live.”


I asked that because Small Blue Thing affects me as much now as it did when I first heard it. But I wonder if that makes you want to scream, “That was on my first album, move on!”


“No, I’m one of those people where time does not pass for me. I totally get it. I realise there’s a group of songs that if I don’t sing them up front people start yelling and getting anxious that I’m not gonna sing them. But I know that when I go and see people per- form, especially Leonard Cohen, I wanna hear the old stuff.”


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