Chapter 1 - The Deep Freeze
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"Quiet muffled blast"
From the start, Suzanne Vega's music tackled something that was challenging and subtle: working out not only identity, but of how one might relate to a world with which one does not entirely connect, to learn what feelings mean and to find a home for them. "Careful" or "deliberate" are legitimate words to describe the feeling one gets reading her lyrics or listening to her music.
But these words do not seem adequate to capture the almost ritualistic subtext to her music. It feels as though she is laying the words on the alter of some mute and inaccessible god, hopeful and expectant that through the prayerful and reverent placement of word upon word upon word, some kind of sense might be made of who and what she is. You can feel this quiet reverence in songs like "Cracking," "Tired of Sleeping," "Wooden Horse," or "Blood Sings."
Feelings become objects, firm and sensual to the touch, placed in her back pocket; she'll bring them out now and again to stroke and contemplate, like rosary beads, "like a marble," "turning in your hand," and in this way perhaps divine the truth behind these feelings. Conversely, objects come to life: a magical wooden horse, a china doll. Dreams too are a gateway to some undiscovered country, at times wondrous, at times frightening. She aimed to be a great writer; she did not fail; she succeeded by paring her dreams and her feelings to their most basic components; she distilled the essence; she sliced a connection to the subconscious.
Folk music seeks to subsume the performer within the song, within the community. But Vega's music was ultimately too ambitious and idiosyncratic, too narcissistic to be contained within the traditions of folk. Like Dylan, she was visibly ambitious to do something different, to be noticed. But even Dylan's performance (save perhaps for a few desperate ones in 1965 and 1966 when the stakes were high and the outcome in doubt and he and The Band played with an edgy, aggressive, punk attitude) ultimately backed away from the edge. He would practice his craft and hone his trade, but with a wink of his eye he let us know that none of it really mattered all that much. Although Vega's performance is punctuated by her dry humor, there is never a moment when it is flippant or a throw away. Rather, her music enacts an important ritual - important and serious in the same way that the hungry might enjoy, yet also give thanks to, a meal.
It is a tough, high-wire act, this kind of writing. The entire enterprise rests on the slimmest of foundations - one false word, one tired phrase and the entire structure topples. Difficult too is negotiating the boundary between the personal and the obscure, between the artful and the pretentious. Vega has carried this criticism from her earliest days -- that her music was too clever or serious by half, that it was ultimately too intellectual or too precious. Reaction to her music more often resembles the kind of response accorded to visual artists whose work polarizes viewers.
This first album did and continues to do all of that. Even years after its release there are fresh converts to her work through exposure to this first, great recording. Before making the record, Vega's expectations might have been for a career in music where one could quit one's day job. But between the album's release in April of 1985 and the close of the year, barely 8 months, this first album sold in the kind of quantities only seen by pop music acts. It was an outcome that was entirely unplanned and unforeseen.
Most everything since then -- the expectations, the jealosies both personal and professional, and the microscopic scrutiny of fans -- stems from this quiet, muffled blast. Listening to the recording 16 years later, one is amazed, given what was on the pop charts at the time, that it was even noticed. Of Dylan, Vega once said "It's like he sort of blew the roof off the house of pop music and just expanded it as far as you could possibly take it, and in some ways I don't think it's ever recovered. People still try and do what he did in the '60s, but they haven't quite been able to achieve that." [16] In her own way, Vega did that for alot of songwriters in 1985, set a precedent that many are still trying to match.