Teenagers struggle with a lot of things they don’t understand. It’s part of growing up. One of the most important things is defining oneself. Are you a tough guy or a sensitive poet and thinker? Do you play football or chess? Because it’s not about the thing itself, but how you create your identity. And that guides your perspective on everything.
It’s what you do when you don’t know how to process information; you don’t know how you’re “supposed to respond” … so you create a character, and to borrow a phrase often thrown around, you “fake it till you make it.” Barring some jarring thing that throws you out of the lane you picked in high school, you’ve laid out a prism of your worldview, for better or worse. It’s not that you can’t change and grow after that, but it’s not easy. Whole industries of self-help and analysis are built around the need to reconstruct what you framed up back then.
For me, nothing helped to define the character I’d chosen more than music. And I needed it to tell me things. Just like reading novels and trying to decipher poems like puzzles, I wanted my music to tell me things I didn’t know. Yeah, I wanted to groove with it too. I felt it in my bones when Jimmy Page built up to that solo in Stairway. I’d never tried cocaine at the time, but, man, when Clapton told me about it, I nodded my head as if I knew exactly what he was saying.
But I could also put the ringing Strats aside, and get lost in Harry Chapin telling me about a cab driver running into an ex out of the blue, and it made me wonder what it would be like to love someone you couldn’t have, long before it happened to me.
The first Suzanna Vega song I heard was “Luka,” as I expect is true of most people, though she’d been honing her tone and her writing for a while by then. At first, it struck me as an 80s pop song; it had a catchy hook, typical 80s production work, and a breathy, pleasant tone of voice…conversational, but with enough bounce that it worked on the radio.
You listened to it a few times before you heard the words. It wasn’t a protest song in the old sense. Not rallying the troops or shaking her fist at the gods… she was just telling you this happens; it was what would later be thought of as “awareness.”
“Luka” turned out to be a pale introduction to an amazing writer and storyteller. Mark Twain was often said to be a tremendous “noticer.” Suzanne Vega was a New York girl who didn’t just live there; she noticed it all. She didn’t report what she saw, she told you how she experienced it, and why it mattered. You watched her sort it all out.
I was hooked. I saw her in concert for the first time at the Beacon Theater in her hometown in ‘92 or ‘93. She was tiny, but in complete command. Her small face and ironic smile belied the power of what she was telling you. She wasn’t ripping out fast pentatonic runs on a Strat, but make no mistake; she rocked.
Thirty years later, I’d have made the predictable hash of things in my own life, but landed more or less holding my own. I’d listened to a lot more music and struggled to create some of my own, with middling success.
And then, she showed up yesterday at the Gettysburg Majestic Theater.
The theater is a wonderful venue, inviting but intimate, and the sound system is incredible. I sat right in the front and heard everything clearly. And my head wasn’t ringing like a violated bell afterwards. I look forward to seeing more such shows there, now that I’ve experienced it… I’ve waited too long.
Vega brought a veteran guitarist, Gerry Leonard, who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t need to throw it at you… to paraphrase an old Good Rats song, he plays “tasty.” Also, a remarkable cellist, Stephanie Winters, who came and went throughout the set. They pulled together a setlist comprising songs from throughout her prolific body of work, as well as a handful from a strong and very much current and “alive” new album. Her voice is strong and mature, both literally and in the sense of the new work she’s putting out.
I left the show exhilarated, wanting to grab my guitar and work on something, because it felt like it mattered again.
For me, it was a culmination of my fanhood for her. But it’s nothing like a culmination for Suzanne Vega — she’s just getting started.
Tom Dudra is a local music nerd and civil war bore. He writes about local music, as well as essays and fiction about the civil war era. He is often found on the battlefield with Grant, his vicious basset war hound.
Great article, Tom. Thank you.