AbsurdBeats

I’m not much for happiness (as you may have noticed), but oh, it makes me happy to hear Suzanne Vega on the radio.

Well, it was a segment on Soundcheck about the Suzanne Vega/DNA mashup of “Tom’s Diner”, but still, that counts, right?

(And I have to write “Suzanne Vega”, not “Suzanne” or “Vega”. Suzanne Vega.)

I may have written about this before, but what the hell: I was introduced to Suzanne Vega the summer before I went off to college. It was a presidential election year, and I was doing screamingly boring scut work (something about checking election or registration rolls against the phone book ) for the local Democratic Party. I set up a card table in my parents’ living room in front of the t.v. and switched between CNN (I still have affection for Jeannie Moos) and MTV.

Remember, I am old, so this is still when CNN was new and Turner-owned, and MTV played music.

Anyway, this video came on of this wispy woman with wispy hair with a cool, cool voice singing this song about. . . I don’t know what. Huh, I thought. Not the usual MTV fare.

Then the next day or later that week, the vid played again, and I thought, I gotta write this down, and probably got her name (since I did track down the album) but mis-wrote the song title as “Marianne on the Wall.”

It was, of course, “Marlene on the Wall”, and I never again saw that vid on MTV.

Well. I loved loved loved that album, and loved her cool, cool voice. It’s by no means a spectacular voice—I had no trouble singing along to all of the songs and while I can carry a tune I can’t toss it in the air—but there was a knowingness to it, and a kind of intense detachment. She’s paying attention, she might even get sucked in, but she can still see, she can still sing.

None of my friends were into her music, but that was all right: they hadn’t been particularly into Supertramp or the Jam or the Violent Femmes and yet we still somehow all managed to get along. I saw her by myself at the Union in Madison and then later (I think with a friend) at First Ave in Minneapolis.

She lives in New York and gigs about town, but I haven’t gone to any of her shows. It’s less that my ardor for her music has cooled than that my ardor has cooled, generally.

But I still remember when the mere mention of a favorite artist could lift me out of my shoes.