details
▼ Suzanne Vega: An Intimate Evening of Songs and Stories
▼ Presented by AMP Concerts
▼ 7:30 pm Tuesday, Oct. 4
▼ St. Francis Auditorium, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Ave.
▼ Tickets $30-$41; an additional $150 for a VIP experience; 505-476-5072, ampconcerts.org, nmartmuseum.org
Whether she hooks you with a gentle but affecting voice, memorable choruses, and perceptive lyrics that often feel autobiographical, Suzanne Vega is up there with a select number of rockers who can take the commonplace and small moments that occur in the course of a day and invest them with drama, meaning, double meanings, and a sense of the pain and joy of living.
Someone like Laura Nyro or Lou Reed comes to mind.
In An Evening of New York Songs and Stories (2020), a 24-track live album recorded at Café Carlyle in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Vega cements a legacy. Released on her own label, Amanuensis Productions, the album’s laced with familiar numbers such as “Marlene on the Wall,” “Tom’s Diner,” and “Freeze Tag,” and she segues, conversationally, from one to the next, talking about her New York City experiences.
“The first time I saw Lou Reed, I was 19 years old,” she tells the audience on the live recording. “I had just moved out of my parents’ apartment. I had rented myself a little room near Barnard College, where I was going to school. I had bought myself a bright red lipstick at the drug store and bright red fingernail polish, and I felt very liberated and free and very rock ‘n’ roll.
“So, this guy took me on a date, and Lou Reed was playing at Columbia University. And I had dimly remembered him — from the song I’m about to sing — from the radio. But that show really turned things around for me in terms of songwriting and songs and rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, that show really showed me what rock ‘n’ roll was.”
Then she launches into a folk-infused rendition of Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Kris Kristofferson (from left), Victoria Williams, Suzanne Vega, Vin Scelsa, and Lou Reed at The Bottom Line in 1994, photo Ebet Roberts
When it comes to telling stories, Vega is a natural. She appears live at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, Oct. 4, in the St. Francis Auditorium at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The event, billed as An Intimate Evening of Songs and Stories, is a stop on Vega’s post-COVID tour in support of the album.
“We’re really focusing more on general hits that the audience likes,” Vega told Pasatiempo. “We’ll do a couple of songs from New York Songs and Stories, which tend to be staples anyway.”
For An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, Vega was joined by guitarist Gerry Leonard, bassist Jeff Allen, and keyboardist Jamie Edwards.
“With its outstanding performances, An Evening of New York Songs and Stories also serves as an excellent Vega primer, an artist who still merits being on your radar no matter what your hometown may be,” wrote Pablo Gorondi in his 2020 review in The Associated Press .
But, in revisiting the hits, listeners hear the maturity, the relaxed and personable stage presence, honored by years of touring, that make the unassuming Vega a commanding performer.
Born in Santa Monica, California, the 63-year-old singer/songwriter was raised in New York City from the age of two. She grew up in the neighborhood of Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side, rising to prominence in the mid-1980s with a number of hits, including “Left of Center” and the heartbreaking “Luka,” a song about a young boy who’s suffering physical abuse at home.
Walked into the door again
Well, if you ask, that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
“Luka” won Best Female Video at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards, two years before her album Days of Open Hand (1990), won a Grammy for Best Album Package.
She’s been nominated for multiple Billboard Music Awards and Grammy Awards and won the British NME Award for Best Female Singer in 1987.
A regular at Lilith Fair, Vega shared the stage with leading female performers of the 1980s and 1990s, including Tracy Chapman and Lisa Loeb. But Vega’s own star rose long before. And it rose quickly, with the release of her first album, Suzanne Vega (A&M Records, 1985). Within the year, she’d be collaborating with composer Philip Glass and recording alongside David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and Paul Simon for Glass’ album Songs from Liquid Days (CBS, 1986).
Her output as a musician is well-known internationally; her acting career, less so. But it’s another area where Vega, who’s comfortable in intimate audience settings and peppering performances with conversation, is a natural.
“When I was in high school, I had majored in modern dance and worked with various choreographers,” says Vega, who recently completed a film version of her 2011 one-woman stage play, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, called Lover, Beloved ( 2022). “And then, when I went to college, I minored in theatre.”
The live theater version of the McCullers play, which ran off-Broadway at New York’s Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, was, at the time, the culmination of Vega’s near-lifelong fascination with an author long associated with the Southern Gothic genre of fiction. She was known for the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946).
Vega and director Michael Tully on the set of Lover, Beloved; photo Amy Bench
“I became interested in Carson McCullers when I was in college,” she says. “The first draft of that play was called Nothing Human. I performed it in school for a very small audience. When we did Carson McCuller’s Talks About Love at the Rattlestick, that was my first time acting off-Broadway.”
Vega was drawn to McCullers’ writing before she knew anything about the author.
“The first time I read anything by Carson McCullers, it was a short story called “Sucker,” Vega says. “It’s written from the point of view of an adolescent boy and his relationship with, I think it’s a distant cousin who comes to stay with them. The distant cousin has a crush on the narrator. It’s a story about unrequited love, basically. But I loved the tone of it, which was so real and so modern. I thought this was written by a young man in the ’70s, and it turned out to be written by a Southern woman in the ’50s.
“I liked the tone, the slang, the way she expressed the feelings between these two boys, the intimacy, intensity, and violence of it. I thought, ‘I like this guy, Carson McCullers.’”
It was McCullers’ photo on the cover of a published biography that set Vega straight. But it also elicited an empathic response. Here was a fellow spirit.
“There’s this lanky woman, and her hair’s kind of the way I cut my hair, wearing a jacket, and I like to wear jackets. I sort of fell in love with her in my college years and wanted to bring her to life, to stand on a stage and talk about feelings, her life, and her work.”
Vega’s auditioned for several film roles, “none of which, I felt, were the right fit, nor did the directors,” she says. “So, that’s how my acting career has gone.”
Vega once auditioned for the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg film Sister Act, and it didn’t go so well.
“I did a monologue from the Carson McCuller’s material, and they were not happy. They were like, ‘This is Disney. Do you think you could lighten it up a little?’ I wasn’t really prepared to do that, so of course, the role went to someone else who looked vaguely like I did at that time.”
pull rate
“There’s this lanky woman, and her hair’s kind of the way I cut my hair, wearing a jacket, and I like to wear jackets. I sort of fell in love with her in my college years and wanted to bring her to life, to stand on a stage and talk about feelings, her life, and her work.” — Suzanne Vega on Carson McCullers
Lover, Beloved, which is her first feature film credit, was penned solely by Vega. In the film, as McCullers, she appears in a number of intimate domestic settings, telling stories of her life experiences. And in this performance Vega disappears and McCullers, for a short time, is brought back to life.
That is, until she breaks into song. Then the two, Vega and McCullers, converge.
“Vega, sporting McCullers’ signature pixie haircut and affecting a peculiar cadence, details the writer’s chronic illness, alcoholism, adulterous marriage, and loves unrequited on a handful of minimally decorated sets,” wrote Josh Kopecki in his March 2022 review in the Austin Chronicle . “Directed with an unobtrusive charm by Austin filmmaker Michael Tully (Don’t Leave Home, Ping Pong Summer), Lover, Beloved is an earnest love letter to a literary eccentric uniquely skilled in illuminating the more forlorn regions of that restless four-chambered organ .”
The film, for which Vega is currently seeking distribution, was shown at South by Southwest, the Austin, Texas-based interactive media and music festival in early spring. An album version, Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, was released on Amanuensis in 2016.
Each version, from Nothing Human to Lover, Beloved, is an evolution, and no two versions are the same.
“Carson McCuller’s Talks About Love had its run at the Rattlestick,” Vega says. “I wasn’t happy, in the end, with that play. It was a little more experimental than I had wanted it to be. I wanted something with more of a classic arc. So I rewrote it, and that became the final version, which is Lover, Beloved.”
Vega says she reached her limit on projects around McCullers but would like to see more done with it.
“I do have a little dream. One of these days, if there becomes an interest for it, I’d love to see a version of the Carson McCullers play with a transgender actor playing the young Carson and a person in a wheelchair playing her in the second portion of the show. The original second act was performed in a wheelchair. I had wheelchair choreography that I followed. If that could happen in my lifetime, I’d be really happy about that.”
Comments are closed.