Surviving the Hits (2008)
Surviving the Hits

                                
                                
                                    
                                    A couple of weekends ago I began what I call my “bread-and-butter” touring season. I had two shows, one in Long Island and one in Saratoga, N.Y. I had a raging head cold, but made it through and came home
                                        to check on a few days worth of e-mails.
                                    Suzanne Vega in 1986. (Photo: Paula Bullwinkel)
                                    At first I couldn’t tell what was going on. As I went to access my account, I kept seeing my own face flashing at me on my computer, in between photos of a fire at the Universal Studios and some other news item.
                                        But not a current version of my face — one from before 1990. 
                                    I wondered if my AOL shoebox of photos had burst open and was somehow leaking online in a public way. Then I read the text, which said something like, “Her first hit, ‘Luka,’ brought the subject
                                        of child abuse to the Top 40. But what was her other one? Hint: It’s catchy!” 
                                    I looked at the screen for a few minutes as it changed from my face to the fire at Universal to the other photo every few seconds. My husband, Paul, came up behind me. 
                                    “Click on it!” he said. I did, and read what followed: “This New Yorker’s poignant tale of an abused child brought a dose of social awareness to the upper reaches of the pop charts. Vega
                                        made her second and final chart visit thanks to an initially unauthorized remix of a three-year-old song about her favorite Manhattan greasy-spoon eatery, a place soon to be even better known from being featured
                                        in ‘Seinfeld’ episodes.”
                                    “They shouldn’t say things like that about you,” said Paul.
                                    “What?” I said. “I thought it was kind of nice.” I had missed the headline, which read: “Two-Hit Wonders!”
                                    Oh, that.
                                    It’s a list I have shown up on fairly often recently, so I had almost gotten used to it. Of course, he’s right, and it’s demeaning — it makes me look as though somehow I managed to squeak
                                        out those two songs and then shuffle back to being a receptionist, which isn’t true.
                                    The way I prefer to see it is that I have had a 20-plus-year career, with a big back catalog of songs that a lot of people know, and want to hear, and yes, two of those songs were big Top 40 hits. What’s to complain
                                        about? They are like the cherries on top of the sundae. Why would I not want that? They have been my passport out of a life in an office, to a life on the road where I can go to Korea and the guy who stamps the
                                        passport says, “Are you Vega, Suzanne? Everybody knows you here.” And his eyes change with emotion when he reads my name.
                                    
                                    So I refuse to be embarrassed by those hits. It doesn’t take away from the rest of the songs. But I have often wondered, “Why those two? Why not the others?” There were other songs just as sparkly
                                        and and shiny and major key and radio friendly like “Book of Dreams” or “No Cheap Thrill” or “Frank & Ava” and so forth. But nothing has had the longevity of those two.
                                        So far, anyway.
                                    Why is that? I have heard both songs described as “flukes,” but I really don’t think that is the case. A lot of hard work went into their production, especially in the arrangements. Let’s
                                        look at “Luka,” for example. I had been listening to Lou Reed’s “Berlin” album — on that record he plays acoustic guitar, and a fair amount of the album is about abuse of
                                        all kinds including domestic abuse.
                                    “Luka” was not a popular song when I would perform it back then. I would watch people from the stage. You could see their faces change as they thought about the lyrics; a frown would appear, then a general
                                        look of unhappiness, followed by a scowl directed at the floor and, at the conclusion, a smattering of reluctant applause. Then a request for something else, usually “Gypsy” or something in a major
                                        key with a chorus. 
                                    It was my manager at the time, Ron Fierstein, who plucked ”Luka” out. “Is that song about what I think it’s about?” he asked one day in the back of Folk City. My memory of that conversation
                                        goes something like this:
                                     “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think it’s about?”
                                    “Unless I am mistaken it seems to be from the point of view of a child who is abused.”
                                    “That’s right. A 9-year-old boy named Luka.”
                                    “Where did you get the name from?”
                                    “A 9-year-old boy who lives in my building. Who is not abused, by the way. I like the name Luka, it’s universal. It could be a girl or boy and it could be any nationality.”
                                    “Well, I think that song could be a hit.” he said. Here I hooted at him.
                                    “What are you talking about? Nobody wants to hear about child abuse. Nobody asks for that song. They want ‘Gypsy’ or ‘The Queen and the Soldier.’”
                                    “It’s a song about a social issue. Songs about social issues are important. We don’t have enough of them now. This generation needs to have more.” This was in 1985.
                                    “I didn’t write it to be be about a social issue — I wrote it as a little portrait. I hate songs about social issues. Everybody knows they don’t work.”
                                    “Well, it is still a song about a social issue. It’s the issue of child abuse, you said it yourself. And how can you say they don’t work? We stopped the Vietnam War with the music we made in the
                                        70’s!” he began to shout, his cheeks flushing pink.
                                    We had a half-hour argument after that about whether songs with a social message worked or not — me taking the more cynical view that if they really worked then Bob Dylan and Joan Baez would have been able to
                                        end all wars. Was there a better anti-war song than “Masters of War”? And yet we had been at war since. Ron shouted that music was part of the dialogue of American culture, along with the marches and
                                        the protests that helped to shape the decisions of a nation.
                                    To say I was skeptical is to completely understate it, but I agreed to start on the pre-production for “Luka.” We even decided not to put it on the first album, which I was working on at the time, but
                                        to delay it for the second one.
                                    One of the things that happened right away is that the producer Steve Addabbo ran into a keyboard player named Peter Wood in the street. Steve played him the song and he had some ideas immediately about how it should
                                        be arranged.
                                    My ideas are usually simple, melodically. What Mr. Wood did was to create a space for the guitar solo and changed the melody line of the fourth verse. This, I have come to realize after years of singing the song, is
                                        the emotional climax of the song, because it goes up there — “You don’t ask WHY!” — and is at the top of my range and the top of the melody.
                                    Verse 1
                                    My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before
If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was

                                    Verse 2
                                    I think it’s because I’m clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it’s because I’m crazy
I try not to act too proud
They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore

                                    Guitar solo
                                    Verse 3
                                    Yes I think I’m okay
I walked into the door again
Well, if you ask that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
I guess I’d like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown
Just don’t ask me how I am [X3]
 Verse 1 repeated
                                    My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before
If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was

                                    Verse 4
                                    They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue any more
You just don’t argue any more
You just don’t argue any more.

                                    So, when you hear the song, it’s not just one melodic idea presented the same way three times — that fourth verse tells a story, makes an arc the same way a good narrative does, and when the song concludes
                                        you feel as though you have been somewhere emotionally. This is the purpose of an arranger — to take what’s there musically and arrange the music like a puzzle — to tease out the emotions of
                                        the song and present it to the public in a way that they are “hit” emotionally. More on that later.
                                     We did a lot of other work as well. We kept it in a major key. I had written it that way deliberately, because the stereotype of a sad little boy on a doorstep suffering in a minor key made me furious. It seemed to
                                        me that most children who are abused regularly are sad and scared in the beginning but also eventually accept it as a fact of life, as something you might even expect. There is a matter-of-factness that develops.
                                        So I chose a major key, which we kept.
                                     Weirdly, when the song was done, that casual major-key quality sounded cheerful, upbeat and even triumphant, which wasn’t my intention. Some of it was Jon Gordon’s ringing guitar solo, somewhat influenced
                                        by U2’s the Edge. We were huge U2 fans at the time and they came to our show in Dublin in 1986. Some of it was the pop synth sound and part that Anton Sanko played me at his audition to be in the band. Those
                                        first four notes ascending sounded almost architectural in how he approached the song, and I was deeply impressed.
                                    It took at least a year before the song was arranged, produced and burnished to the sheen that it came out with. I redid my vocal over and over again with Steve Addabbo at the controls. “Why do I have to do it
                                        again? I need to go finish my other lyrics. I don’t want to do it again.” (At that point, Lenny Kaye was helping me to finish some lyrics, especially to “Ironbound,” which I was really
                                        having trouble with.)
                                    I was thinking of asking Lucy Kaplansky to do the background vocals — I liked staying in touch with the folk scene I had been steeped in during the early ‘80s — but I had already asked her to sing
                                        on “Left of Center” the year before. So I asked Shawn Colvin, who sounded great. My management liked her so much they ended up signing her and handled her career for years.
                                    I was hugely distracted by trying to finish the other songs by the deadline to feel any nervousness about “Luka.” I felt that I was hanging from a cliff by my nails — a feeling I have had many times
                                        in my career. How funny that journalists sometimes write about my “relaxed recording schedule”! If your idea of relaxing is hanging by your nails from a cliff, I guess that’s correct.
                                    I sat in on the mixes with Shelley Yackus, a top-notch engineer of that era — it was a big deal that we got him and he contributed a lot to the overall sound of the record. I encouraged him to bring out the sound
                                        of the drums. Everyone always tiptoed around the acoustic guitars and wanted the drums to sound (seem) accidental so they didn’t overshadow the guitar, but this time the guitar sound was nice and fat, so
                                        there was no reason to be so polite.
                                    We had barely finished the album when it was scheduled for release six or seven weeks later, as I remember it. We were on the road when it came out and things changed overnight. Literally. One night we were playing
                                        the usual half-filled theaters and clubs. The next day, and every day after that, each venue was full. This continued for the rest of the year and included two shows at Carnegie Hall and one at Radio City. “Luka”
                                        had been delivered to radio and accepted almost immediately.
                                    Why? Why the huge response? Some of it was the topic — so many people wrote me of their experiences. This has continued right up until this past weekend, when a teenaged girl told me she had been a victim of
                                        child abuse and that she really identified with the character. This was astonishing to me — that so many people from so many cultures from all over the world, including here in America, identified with the
                                        character. I had believed it was about a small personal issue, but Ron had been correct: it was about a huge social one.
                                    A lot of it was the sound of the song, the chemistry of it, since many people had no idea what the song was about. It sounded good on the radio, sounded good before and after certain songs, all the different qualities
                                        of the production gelled in a certain way that people remembered and wanted to hear again. There was a magic about certain things — I have been told that “Luka” means “wounded”
                                        in Indonesian, for example, which I certainly didn’t know when I wrote the song.
                                    Along with acclaim, success and hard work also came criticisms, parodies and complaints. “I don’t want to hear about child abuse when I am drinking coffee in the morning,” one guy wrote in. The
                                        worst letters were from child abuse agencies. “How dare you suggest that the child is responsible for his own abuse!” began a typical one. I threw those letters away, eventually, along with
                                        a bag of parodies, which tended to start, “My name is Loofah, I live on the bathroom floor…” Ha ha. Very funny. Next, please.
                                    “Hit” is a good name for it — a feeling of intense communication with a huge amount of people at the same time. As with a baseball and a bat, a cracking, quick connection. As with drugs, a sudden
                                        alteration of reality. You could get used to it.
                                    That particular intensity lasted about eight months, I’d say until Tracy Chapman appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. “Tom’s Diner” was a hit too, after that, but proved to be a very different
                                        experience than “Luka.” It has gone on to have its own weird history of which I am very proud. More on that later. As for being a two-hit wonder — well, I think it’s better than being
                                        a one-hit wonder, thank you very much.
                                    
                                    
                                    Suzanne Vega, a singer and songwriter whose success in the 1980s helped establish the acoustic folk-pop movement, has released eight albums, including the platinum-selling “Solitude Standing” (1987) with the hit single “Luka” and the 2007 recording “Beauty and Crime” on Blue Note Records. She is also the author of a book of poetry and was a host of the public radio series “American Mavericks.” Her Web site is suzannevega.com.
                                
                                
                            