47: Suzanne Vega

Revisiting 1987's dark folk record Solitude Standing

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Solitude Standing

So we’re at 1987. Not that we’re really going in order.

After I fell for Sinead (musically), music by women poured in through the opened gates. I think I listened for a while to more women than men (early 90s). Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing was the next to slay me - it was huge on my walkman. As I hadn’t listened to it in a long time, I spent last week with it, and I’m glad. It’s a cool record - significant, politically cool; a well-written, somewhat haunted record.

If you know it, you know Tom’s Diner (the do do do do acapella song that starts the record off). That might have made you think this was a light album of little observations.

If you know a little more, you’ll know Luka - the strange, driving, jangle-pop Top 40 song from the point of view of an abused little kid. That was what caught my attention at 17, why I bought the record. And although oftentimes the “main” song on a record becomes the one you never want to hear again - such is overplay - that is not the case here. Luka stands up. The dichotomy is tough, and the song is gutting. The ascendant and hopeful guitar refrain is what is being destroyed.

Vega seems to live in this place: between one thing and another. She sings in a soft, pretty voice, and she’s always singing about brutal things. Her lullaby Night Vision is an instruction in how to survive the darkness; I have a feeling that John Connor’s mother sang things like this to him to prepare him for the Skynet Apocalypse. She advises:

Find the line
Find the shape
Through the grain

Find the outline
And things will
Tell you their name

Useful and true. But sort of fierce, too. The song ends:

I would shelter you, and keep you in light
But I can only teach you night vision

Luka’s not the only brutalized child given voice on Solitude Standing; famous isolate/captive-in-the-dark Kaspar Hauser sings his own song (Wooden Horse). If you don’t know the story, Hauser was an infant heir to some European throne at some point, and so he was raised in a cell from the age of zero, with nothing but a little wooden horse. When he got out he was of course a little fucked up - and a possible assassination target to boot. Vega pulls all of this into, well, this:

I came out of the darkness
Holding one thing
A small white wooden horse
I'd been holding inside

I want to be a rider, like my father
Was the only thing I could say

And when I'm dead
If you could tell them this
That what was wood became alive
What was wood became alive

Who’s to say what the backstory of the narrator is in In the Eye, but I’d guess another beaten on child. Who else grows up tough enough to sing this gentle song?

If you were to kill me now, right here
I would still look you in the eye
I would burn myself into your memory
As long as you were still alive

I would live inside of you
I’d make you wear me like a scar
And I would burn myself into your memory
And run through everything you are

To be honest, I had not noticed this aspect when I was listening in the late 1980s. I had not remembered this record as tough. I was desperate for someone to sing the darkness I saw - that’s why I loved Leonard Cohen at that age, as well. Why I loved Eurythmics and Vonnegut. I had also not noticed how mightily feminist the record is, right during the backlash to the Second Wave. I don’t recall anyone talking about it. But mighty it is: the women in these songs are three dimensional and self-powered.

My name is Calypso
I have let him go
In the dawn he sails away
To be gone forever more
And the waves will take him in again
But he'll know their ways now
I will stand upon the shore
With a clean heart, and my song in the wind
The sand will sting my feet
And the sky will burn
It's a lonely time ahead
I do not ask him to return
I let him go

I have been driving a lot with my wife and played this record for her, and asked her who else it sounded like. I’d been trying to place it and couldn’t. It sounds polished and professionally created, from the '80s but not buried in dated sounds. “Bruce Cockburn?” she suggested, and I went Ohhhh! Yes! It sounds like an 80s Bruce Cockburn record. It’s clear and straightforward.

I could handle a little more grit, myself - I’ve been enjoying live versions for this reason - and I’m not sure I’ll pull it out to hear a lot. But I will not forget to check it out for 30 years again, and if you haven’t, you should probably spend a minute with it.

Here are some samples, followed by a Lemonheads cover of Luka from 1988 and a song by the cutely huge-footed Olive Oyl (from 1980).

Lemonheads Cover (1988)

And This:

Somehow Suzanne Vega reminds me of Shelley Duvall. Shelley Duvall sang a beautiful Harry Nillson song in the '80s Popeye movie. I’m never gonna have a better reason to share it, so I will do so here.

Thanks for reading. As always - if you like it, please share it.

xo

jep