Best of Design Matters: Suzanne Vega

0:00Debbie Millman: This episode of Design Matters originally appeared in September of 2025. It took a long time to learn how to perform. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it. And in fact, that's a lifelong quest for me. How do you embody the feeling and perform it in front of an audience?

0:24From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:31Debbie Millman: On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Suzanne Vega talks about her latest album and opens up about the doubts she had early in her career. Finally, I started to feel like I am a musician. It's in my family.

0:59Debbie Millman: Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where liquid IV comes in. Its science-backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV, hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

1:37Debbie Millman: This episode is brought to you by Lexus. Have you ever considered that the most powerful tool and design is knowing what will move us. Design isn't just about function. It's about feeling, and it's often the smallest details that shape our experience. At Lexus, every car is intentionally designed with that in mind. Master artisans called Takumi don't just focus on what you can see. They obsess over what you can feel. The way the door closes with just the right weight, the precise click of a switch, the acoustic feedback of every control. Instead of relying solely on instruments, Takumi artisans add something more.

2:22Debbie Millman: They rely on human perception and intuition honed over years to create experiences that sound and feel just right. That's the philosophy behind Lexus, engineering to be felt. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. The Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional.

3:11Debbie Millman: It's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vail Smart Toilet is sleek with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceed expectations. It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail.

3:55Debbie Millman: Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com. For over four decades, Suzanne Vega has been one of the most distinctive and quietly revolutionary voices in music. From her songs Luca, which gave voice to the unspoken, to Tom Steiner, which became a cultural touchstone, and even the blueprint for the MP3, her music has blended the intimate with the universal. A poet of observation and empathy, Suzanne Vega has continually reinvented her sound while staying true to her storytelling roots. With her new album, Flying with Angels, she once again captures the struggles and resilience of our times.

4:43Debbie Millman: Suzanne Vega, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you. Suzanne, I read that you've been mistaken for Cynthia Nixon, Beth Orton, Isabella Rossellini, and Molly Ringwald. What do you make of that range of doppelgangers? I don't know. I guess I remind people of something or someone. I think I'm a little bit of a shapeshifter, actually. I think it's amusing. Do you enjoy that sort of chameleon quality? Well, I've come to live with it. It took me a while to realize that was even happening. You know, when I was in my 20s and I started to do photo shoots, I realized that every photo looked different, and I looked like a different woman in each photo.

5:33That is something I've never quite been able to figure out or to control, is the whole issue of image. So I don't bother with it anymore so much. I work on certain things, but most people know me by my name and my voice.

5:50Debbie Millman: You were born in Santa Monica, but moved to Spanish Harlem when you were two. There you lived with your parents, your mom and stepfather, and in a multicultural household. How did that shape your sense of identity as a child? It confirmed the idea that I was a changeling, that I was mutable, that identity was mutable, because I grew up close to my Puerto Rican relatives, to my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, and spoke Spanish, had been to Puerto Rico. And then later on, I realized, well, my stepfather told me that I had a different father. And you were nine when that happened, I believe. Yeah, I was nine.

6:38And so I thought I had my identity sort of down, you know, even though I was constantly getting feedback from kids in the neighborhood and other people who would see our family would sort of look at me and go, OK, where did she come from? Because in a sense, I was the red haired stepchild, you know, literally that kind of stood out in our family. So I learned then that identity was something that could change, that could change overnight, and that ultimately I learned not to identify with cultural things like am I Puerto Rican, am I white, that became something that could fall away. So I learned to define myself from the inside using other signifiers.

7:26I, since I'm a changeling, I feel that I don't need to mark myself in that way. I just, I find a way to be myself without joining any particular group.

7:36Debbie Millman: You've said that you've always felt more of an observer than a participant. And do you trace that to your childhood in a household that was both nurturing and volatile? So, yeah, I'm sure some of it was, but some of it I think was also my, my nature. Over the years, I've come to wonder and believe that I probably am somewhat neurodivergent. Sometimes if you're neurodivergent, you have a delay in emotional processing. So I think I have that. And so therefore, there are times where maybe something's going on in the household and I have to respond. So because I'm not fully emotionally invested in the moment, that sort of comes later.

8:24It can be two days later. It can be a month later. It can be a year later. There's a sense of sort of delay where I process things. No matter what household I grew up in, I think I would still have a bit of that. It's interesting.

8:37Debbie Millman: I wonder if that slight detachment, initial detachment, is what has fueled some of your ways of communicating in other ways, whether it be performance or singing or acting or any of the other, certainly writing, other things that you do. Well, you know, it's interesting that you bring up acting because sometimes people are like, why would you write a one-woman show and perform it for an hour and 45 minutes? Like, are you expecting to get other roles or like, are you expecting to like join the realm of great actresses? And I'm like, no, no, none of that. I'm not trying to be the next Meryl Streep.

9:23This is more, it was more like an exercise for myself where I could practice feeling things in the moment and doing it over and over again so that I could practice. Here's where I feel sad. Here's where I feel happy. Here's where I feel the sadness of someone's death or, you know, I could, it was for myself almost as an exercise, how to connect myself with my feelings. So that's why I enjoy acting so much. And I've also enjoyed dancing for a similar thing, different way of inhabiting your feelings, your body. So I do those things because I love to do them. And it makes me better at feeling my feelings in the moment.

10:07Debbie Millman: Yeah. You picked up a guitar at 11 years old and wrote your first songs when you were 14. And I believe that the first song you wrote was titled Brother Mine. Yeah. What inspired that particular song? And what did you think of the song back then after you wrote it? There were a couple of things that had inspired that song. I mean, it was based on my brother, Matthew, who used to get into fights a lot. And so it was a song to reassure him that I still loved him, even though he got into fights. What had inspired me was the fact that my father, my stepfather, Ed, had also written a song to Matthew, sort of based loosely on the, my blue-eyed son.

10:56Where have you been, my blue-eyed son? So he took a bit of that form and wrote a song for Matthew, which I featured in. I had my own little verse. So that was exciting. And I thought I too would write a song about Matthew. And I also loved the Judy Collins version of a song called Liverpool Lullaby, which I'd never heard a song like that. It was so beautiful and so real. The verse says,

11:51for three years, I thought it was never going to happen. From the years from 11 to 14, I mean, that was almost a quarter of my life spent trying to write songs. So I thought I was actually really bad at it. But then I wrote that one and I thought, oh, that's not bad. Let me try another one. And then I wrote The Silver Lady. And then I thought, oh, I might be pretty good at this.

12:14Debbie Millman: I have spent two decades now talking to artists of every ilk, and I always feel compelled to ask musicians and songwriters how they go about writing a song. Where does that come from? It's one of the artistic forms I feel is so mysterious and magical. As somebody that's done a lot of writing, as somebody that's done a lot of illustrating, I understand where both the motivation and the muse comes from. But with songwriting, it's a mystery. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how a song comes to you. Well, what you said is exactly right. It's a mystery. It comes to you. And you sort of have to set up the right atmosphere.

13:06You have to sort of invite it in without being too obvious. You know, you have to seduce the song. You have to make it comfortable so it can come to you and then present itself to you. If you're too obvious about it, it just goes somewhere else. So it took a while to realize that. That said, I think I've written a song at this point in my life in every way that there is to write a song. So if it's not coming to you and you've made it soft and comfy and given it special lighting and its favorite treats and everything, you know, and it's still not coming, then it's time to hit the thesaurus and the rhyming dictionary.

13:46And you just sit down and work on it like it's a crossword puzzle and just nail the thing. Sometimes it has to be that way. But there is a sense of calling something forth, prayer almost, in a really good song. And the best ones are when it starts to happen by itself. The language starts to rhyme and you get these rhythms and the melody shapes itself. Those are really wonderful moments.

14:14Debbie Millman: A couple of years after you wrote Brother Mine, the bass player Richard Davis heard the song and told you that structurally and formally, it was really good. And you've since included it on your 2012 album Close-Up Volume 4, Songs of Family. How do you view that song now? Do you see it in a different light, knowing that you wrote it when you were 14? It is a good song. Thank you. I think it's an anomaly for me, A, because it's a country song. You know, and it really does have a sort of, you know, major key, very country, which was, I was exploring that genre when I was about 14. I had been looking at not just country, but real folk, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, songs about traveling on the train, this kind of thing.

15:04so that it's an anomaly because of that but i like it i like it because of that and i like it because it has a kind of earnestness and it's kind of funny and uh i think that in the end richard davis was correct it does have a good form um and there are some things about the songwriting that is somewhat sophisticated someone pointed out that i i draw this picture of my brother very clearly for an audience, which I would have had to have thought about that because I already knew him. So I didn't have to do that. But I did. So I made it clear to an audience what I saw in my brother and what he was like, so that they could understand it.

15:47And I thought, oh, that's well spotted.

15:49Debbie Millman: That's really well spotted. And it's given me a better understanding of why it's so much harder for me to interview people I know well, because it's much harder for me to paint a picture. It just occurred to me. I've always wondered, why is it so much harder? Yeah. I understand your first performance as a singer was actually with Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall. Yes. Oh, what a thrill that was. Yeah. He came to my school looking for children to sit at his feet. He was doing a benefit for a couple of progressive schools in New York City, and I was determined to get him to notice me. And I stood very close to him and sang as loudly as I could, which would, I don't know how loud that was, but I sang Guantanamera, like, you know, in his face practically.

16:38And he chose me, and he chose everybody else on the stoop also. So we all were there at his feet, and I loved it. I just remember the vast space of Carnegie Hall and the applause, and Pete Seeger, who we knew, he knew his music growing up. So it was a splendid moment, and I think I resolved, that was probably one of the moments I resolved to not let go of that stage.

17:07Debbie Millman: By the time you were 16, you had written around 50 songs. Yet at that point, your heart was set on being a dancer. And that's what you studied at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts. Why did you choose dance over music at that time? Well, actually, I'll share a secret with you. When the music department teachers found out that I wrote songs, because I was always dragging the guitar around and playing at lunchtime, I played a few of my songs from Mr. Trevor, who was the head of the music department. And he said, why don't you have a double major? come on over to the music department. I lasted about a month.

17:46I was not suited to learning music theory. All my buddies were in the music department and all the boys I liked were in the music department. So I would have loved to have stayed there. But I just sort of crept quietly back to the dance department once I realized I could not learn the things they were trying to teach me. That became apparent very quickly. And I think in the course of my life, I've tried six or seven times to learn music theory. And the last time I tried it, I was 27 years old. I'd already sold 4 million albums. And I thought, you know, I'm just going to farm this out to other people, because there's no point in my trying to learn it formally at this point.

18:30Debbie Millman: I read that for most of your life, you didn't consider yourself a real musician, because you never were able to read music. Yeah. Is that still how you feel? Is it possible? Because now it's like 10 million albums or something like that. My vision of that changed when I met my birth father. I met my birth father at the age of 28 after I'd had this big success. And he sent me all these photographs of his mother and father who he had not known. And it turns out my grandmother was a drummer and spent a lot of her time on tour. And my grandfather was a trumpet player. And they had four children, and they gave up my father for adoption.

19:17So he never knew them. And I didn't know my dad. So suddenly I realized that this was a family. And many of them played music and could not play technically. They learned by ear, like I did. Some of the other cousins that I've met are gifted both ways. They can play and they can read, but not me and not my dad. So I thought, oh, this makes sense. Finally, I started to feel like I am a musician. It's in my family. I come from a family of musicians. But, you know, there's some kind of dyslexia there where you feel it but can't read it.

19:57Debbie Millman: So at this point, you are 16 or so. You don't know about your musical inheritance and you're considering becoming a dancer. But I read that you got pushed out of the dance department because your teachers told you that you thought too much to be a really good dancer. And I'd never heard that before. What does that mean to be too much of a thinker to be a dancer? Well, that goes back to the neurodivergent delay in processing feelings. It wasn't that I was pushed out of the dance department. It's that when I graduated, I asked my teachers, where should I go? Where should I apply? Because I wanted to stay in New York because I wasn't sure if I should be a dancer or a songwriter.

20:45And so they suggested to me that I had two places. One was NYU Dance Department, which I applied there. and the other one was Barnard College. So I thought, well, I'll apply for both. And I got into both. So there I had to make my choice. Am I going to be a dancer or am I going to go to Barnard College, be a scholar? I wasn't sure about the songwriting thing because I think they may have said I didn't have the temperament for a performer. So I was feeling doubtful. But it's because a great performer really can embody the emotion in the moment. and you shouldn't see the counting that goes on, the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

21:28You know, that's not interesting to look at for an audience member. So it took a long time to learn how to perform for me. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it. And in fact, that's a lifelong quest for me. How do you embody the feeling and perform it in front of an audience?

21:49Debbie Millman: When you went to college, you majored in English literature and you studied writers like Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Carson McCullers. What motivated that decision? I mean, I also read how when you were very young, you saw a stage with an empty spotlight and remembered being attracted to that space. And so as somebody that was pulled towards performance, whether it be songwriting or dancing or anything that was sort of motivating your body to move through music or with music, it was really surprising to me to read that you were considering becoming a scholar. Yeah, I decided to go to Barnard, and everybody had always told me how smart I was, and I loved to read, so that was sort of a no-brainer.

22:41So for the first year or two, I worked in the library. I had scholarships, work-study, and loans, but I had to find a place to work on campus. So after a while, I think I got in trouble in the library for sitting and reading the books instead of putting them back on the shelves, and that was becoming a problem. So I went to look for a work-study job, and I saw that there was an opening in the theater. And I was sort of afraid of the theater, because that represented everything I seemed to be bad at. But I thought, well, they need someone to run their costume department. And I love costumes, so I thought, you know, I just went for the interview, because why not?

23:24They said, could I sew? And I said I knew how to do hems, and I could sew buttons. And they said, great, you're hired. So I got into this world of the theater. And that's what I minored in theater in college. So even though I had this major with English literature, I got very caught up in the theater world there and started by doing the tech work of the wardrobe. And then slowly started to put my big toe into the waters of actual performing and figuring out how do you do this?

23:58Debbie Millman: If you can talk about how your drama teacher, Shirley Kaplan, helped you break out of your shell. I love that story. I think my listeners would love it, too. Well, you know, I'd heard about Shirley Kaplan, and she had this special class called the Musical Ensemble Theater. And she was supposed to be really good at bringing people out of themselves, bringing people out of their shells. And I remember thinking, no way. She's not getting me out of my shell. And she told me later, years later, that she felt the same way when she saw me. She said, there's no way I'm getting in there. But she still accepted me for her class.

24:33And I found to my surprise that she did. She managed to get through all of these neurodivergent ways of being and thinking by throwing things at me while I was singing. Not hard things, but like a ball or like an apple. or she'd make me run around the room while singing something, which, you know, that feels so weird when you first do it. You feel like an idiot. And so you start to laugh because, and then the class laughs with you and then you feel sort of free. So she did that kind of thing or she'd get me out of my head as she put it. One day I sang, I think it's going to rain today by Randy Newman.

25:16And she made me get dressed. She made me like put on a scarf as though I was singing it into a mirror. And it was wonderful because it really did make you drop all of your self-consciousness and, you know, you had to respond. If she threw something at you, you had to catch it and then throw it back. So you had to interact. And it did wonders for my confidence.

25:42Debbie Millman: Is that what helped fuel your confidence to go out and start performing in some of the New York City cabarets and become part of the Greenwich Village Songwriters Exchange? Eventually I did. But at first, all I had the courage to do was audition for the Fernald Folk Festival. Fernald was one of the dorms on campus in Columbia. I tried there and I sang three or four songs and everybody talked about it all year. So then I sang the year following and then I started to get a little following of people who like my songs. But I also performed in Shirley Kaplan's Cabaret. She had a little performing group that she would take us around and we would perform different places and do our songs.

26:28And that was also a great source of confidence for me. And I started to make my way down to the village and eventually made my way to Folk City.

26:38Debbie Millman: By the time you were 20, you had a lot of songs. You developed a style you did feel was your own. What made you decide at that point you were ready to go out and maybe become a professional musician? First of all, I never really stopped. I mean, there was that first year when I was at Barnard where I had started going down to the village when I was 16. I had heard that you start by going to the bitter end, and you work your way up to Folk City. And then maybe if you're really good, you could play the bottom line. So I took it very literally. So I was like, first, first, I'm going to play at the bitter end.

27:16So I went there for two years on Monday nights, performed for the guy who was always eat his dinner. He always said the same thing.

27:26Debbie Millman: What did he say? He said, you're too quiet. You don't have any stage presence. Your songs are pretty good. They're almost like poetry. You know, he would say this with a look that implied that this was nonsense. But he's like, if you can write that stuff, you can write real songs. So he kept telling me I needed more experience. And finally, it occurred to me to stop going there and go somewhere else. So I think I was 16, 17, 18 when I was going to the Bitter End and getting rejected. I still have never played the Bitter End. I read that. It's hard for me to believe. Bitter End, what are you thinking?

28:07But then I had a year of the musical ensemble theater class. And then by the time I was 20, I think that's when I went to Folk City for the first time. And I managed to bring 30 people down as part of my audience on a Sunday afternoon for Folk City. And they were impressed by that. So they booked me.

28:27Debbie Millman: You were rejected by every major record label, including A &M twice before they eventually signed you. I believe that in one of the rejection letters they sent you, it stated, Suzanne Vega has no sense of melody. Yeah. What? Well, we had started that demo tape with cracking because I felt this was a signature song. I felt it was very modern. I felt that it was very rock and roll. It was sort of related tangentially to this hip-hop stuff that was coming up and also felt like Lou Reed to me. So I felt like this was going to really show everybody how cool I was and how different I was than all the other folk singers.

29:15And then we got this rejection letter. So I was like, okay. But in the end, I still feel that it was the right way to present the songs. And of course, if you listen to other songs, Tom's Diner, that's a melody that sticks in everyone's head. So I eventually made peace with the guy who wrote that letter. He was my A &R guy at A &M for years.

29:40Debbie Millman: If you were rejected twice and then finally accepted, that means you were trying three times. Yeah, we kept submitting demo tapes and we were on the verge of signing what was called a development deal. They were going to give us a small amount of money so that we could develop a demo tape that they might like. And I think it was Nancy Jeffries who was piloting that project. And she brought Lenny Kay onto the scene to see whether that would sort of change things up a little bit. And just as all of that was going on, I got a really good review in the New York Times, and that brought David Geffen in.

30:18So then there became a bidding war. And then I signed an actual deal with A &M.

30:24Debbie Millman: What did that rejection at that time, did it give you a different perspective on people not accepting you and then accepting you? You know, I never took the rejections personally. And since I'd already been rejected for two years by the bitter end, I mean, it was just like, that's the game. They say no, you say yes. If the door is closed, go around. You know, if you're standing there pounding on the door and it doesn't open, go to a different one. And so I never thought, oh, everybody hates me. I was like, no. I had a lot of confidence in myself and in my vision. And if one person said to me, your lyrics really touched me or your lyrics really mean a lot to me, that would be enough to keep me going to write another song every few weeks.

31:13I thought if they don't like the music, it's because of the neurodivergent thing. You know, maybe they don't understand what the point of view is here, what the perspective is. But again, I didn't take it personally. And Ron and Steve Adabo were great to work with. Ron Fierstein and Steve Adabo, they were a great team to work with. Steve taught me, in a sense, how to sing by throwing me back into the studio and continuing to sing. It could be very critical, and I would complain a lot. But eventually I learned my craft through working with them.

32:14Debbie Millman: artisans called takumi don't just focus on what you can see. They obsess over what you can feel. The way the door closes with just the right weight, the precise click of a switch, the acoustic feedback of every control. Instead of relying solely on instruments, takumi artisans add something more. They rely on human perception and intuition honed over years to create experiences that sound and feel just right. That's the philosophy behind Lexus, engineering to be felt. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer.

33:01Debbie Millman: This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. The Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vail Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional. It's a philosophy that design changes everything. The Kohler Vail Smart Toilet is sleek, with a rounded shape that's more like architecture than just plumbing. And it goes beyond looks. The touchscreen controls and customizable cleansing features offer a level of comfort and cleanliness that exceed expectations.

33:46Debbie Millman: It's all about elevating those ordinary daily rituals into something extraordinary through thoughtful design. Kohler has been pushing these boundaries for over 150 years, mastering that balance of stunning form and high-performance function. That's a long time to get it right, and it shows in every detail. Experience the difference of Kohler Smart Toilets. Find out more at Kohler.com.

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35:22Debbie Millman: Let's talk about your first album. I have to share that back in the summer of 1985, when it first came out, I first saw posters of the album cover that were wheat pasted all over Manhattan. And I was working in a really seedy neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen. I was working as a receptionist for a nutritionist and was trying to figure out what my whole life was going to be that summer. And I saw the poster and I was mesmerized and I bought the album based on the poster. And it was all I listened to for the rest of the year. I could recite that entire album word for word still 40 years later. I have the original vinyl.

36:07Debbie Millman: I bought it again on CD. Now I have it all on the MP3s, along with Joni Mitchell's Blue and Ricky Lee Jones' first album. These are like formative albums to my life. My younger self is thanking you right now for making it because it did help me through a lot of really hard times. That's so great. Thank you. Now, is it true that you sang Undertow, one of the songs on that album, at your sister's wedding? She asked me to. Yeah. I thought, sure. You know, she liked it. I liked it. The first two lines of the song, I believe right now if I could, I would swallow you whole. I would leave only bones and teeth.

36:45Debbie Millman: I would see what was underneath. And that's not anything that's written in front of me. That's how well I know it. Yeah. I didn't think the song had any lascivious undertones at the time, but did anybody else at the wedding wonder? Well, I don't know if anyone else at the wedding wondered, but my brother thought it was weird, and he told me so, because he had assumed that it was a song about oral sex, because, of course, he was a young man, and that was very much on his mind. But I thought of it as more of a spiritual sort of taking in and kind of stripping someone clean. And interestingly, I was dating the man then who is now my husband.

37:26So I had written it for Paul, and I remember singing it for him. And he said, that's one of your most beautiful songs. And he said, but I would be free, but I would also be dead. And that was his comment. And we never talked about it again. So I was like, okay. So yeah, it was a song that could be interpreted many ways, but I think the opening line prevented it from being a single. You know, at one point we were playing with the idea of sending it to radio, and I think it was rejected for that. Might be conceived, you know, considered lascivious, which now is like, you know, it wouldn't even...

38:05Debbie Millman: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Wouldn't even, you wouldn't. And interestingly, it's so melodic. I mean, it's so crazy to me to think that somebody would have said that you weren't melodic. But songs like Freeze Tag and Cracking, A Marlena on the Wall, Small Blue Thing, one of my all-time favorites, they were so sophisticated for someone so young and really did immediately establish you as a singer-songwriter who actually created stories in her songs. When did you begin to feel that you had a distinctive voice of your own rather than echoing your influences? I know you felt like you had established your style earlier, but to have a distinctive voice so young is really rare.

38:50I realize that now, but back then I didn't feel young. You know, as I said, it took me three years to write my first song from 11 to 14. So I felt like I'd been working constantly and slowly for all these years. I had made a decision that I wanted to get a record deal. I made that decision when I was 16 and it took me eight years to get that record deal. So there were times where I thought, this is going so slowly, this is never going to happen. But by the time I did get the record deal and it came out, there was this huge acceptance and my life changed pretty radically almost overnight. But it's because I'd been working so hard all those years before.

39:34I felt that the first songs were strong. When I wrote Gypsy, I remember thinking that that was a good song. I worried that it was corny, you know, and sentimental. And I rewrote the whole thing to be less corny and sentimental. And a friend of mine said, I think it was fine the first way you did it.

39:55Debbie Millman: Yeah, I love that song. I was wondering, when you said that if the current version is the original. It's the original version. Yeah, it's the original version. I have another version somewhere, which I should probably put as a B-side somewhere. So I remember thinking that that was good. That was sort of influenced a bit by Leonard Cohen, but maybe by somebody else, like maybe John Prine, because I listened to those writers also. But when I saw Lou Reed, then normally I hated rock and roll. I thought it was a bunch of posers standing around in costumes doing stupid stuff and posing. So I wasn't really into it.

40:33But someone took me to see Lou Reed. And I hated the first half of the show. I thought, why? He's doing that stupid posing thing. Shouting at the audience, lighting cigarettes and throwing them at the audience, bashing his equipment, singing things I thought were offensive. I can't remember what, heroin probably, which I didn't think was cool. I'd come from East Harlem, which had a heroin epidemic. And I was like, this is gross. So, but the second half of the show was all this music. He sang a song called Caroline Says Part Two. And I just was so taken with that song. And I thought, because I heard the lyrics, I heard them clearly.

41:18I realized he was writing in a female voice, even though he was male. obviously um it was like a bit of fiction and that i suddenly had this awakening and i became obsessed with lou reed and i felt that's when i started to write cracking and some of the other songs that had more edge and definitely that moment influenced when i wrote luca i was gonna

41:44Debbie Millman: ask yeah they for that for listeners that might not be aware of the song um caroline says is a song about a woman being abused, physically abused. Yeah. So let's talk about Luca. Your second album, Solitude Standing, was massively successful. It featured two global hits, Luca and Tom Steiner, both of which are still songs that have stood the test of time, but they've also been massively reproduced by others, particularly Tom Steiner, which I think has been covered about 30 times and sampled. Last I read was 155 times, 155 samples. I think the doorman looked it up from where I'm living now, and he says it's up to 187.

42:31Interpolations. My numbers are wrong. Because, you know, maybe there's been a month or two maybe since you looked it up. It's constant. I've been working on the prep for a while, so yeah.

42:41Debbie Millman: Yeah. But Luca was an unlikely pop hit. It's actually a devastating song from the perspective of a young boy. And I read that you wrote it before your first album came out, before you even had a record deal. What made you decide to release it on your second album? I had a vision of what I wanted the first album to be like. And the first album is that album. I wanted the songs to be modern. That's why I started with cracking and that's why we have neighborhood girls but i also included the queen and the soldier because it felt folky to me so i could still retain that folk root so i felt that luca was not i was not ready to sing that song in public my manager picked that song out when he first heard it he said i think that song could be a hit and i was like what a song about child abuse a It was a song about child abuse because no one seemed to like it.

43:40You know, it was a song that people didn't understand. And if they did, then they looked sad and they looked embarrassed. And it was a song nobody asked for. Once in a while, I'd get a comment like, oh, that's a very interesting song. You've really given that child a voice. But most people were like, oh, my God, please stop. And this was in the era of punk and new wave. So the subject matter was supposed to be as edgy as possible. That's partly why I wrote it, but I almost felt like I'd almost gone too far. So to have my manager say, this is a song about an issue. And they took the two years in between the first album and the second album to work on the production.

44:18And it took that long to get it just right. So it would go to radio and fit right in. And that's what happened. They worked on the drum track. They worked on the rhythm track. We had the keyboard part by Anton Senko that had that great opening line. His keyboard part went dun, dun, dun, dun, then my guitar came in. So all of this came together to make the sound that would fit in with radio.

44:48Debbie Millman: You took the name Luca from A Boy That Lived in Your Building, but many years after the song came out, you stated, I am Luca. Yes, many years. Yeah. What was that like for you to share that? You know, no matter how many years go by, I still feel a sense of, I don't know how to describe it, really. A bit of fear, a bit of exposure.

45:23there's a reason I've made it almost like a puppet you know this was a Luca was sort of my puppet I used to make puppet shows for my brothers and sisters when I was to entertain them and and I like to use the third person which I did in the songs often it made me feel safe I don't normally like confessional songwriting but when I said that I thought well what prompted it really was the feeling over time and over decades that, because in the beginning, I used to say, it doesn't matter if it happened to me. It only matters that it happened. It only matters that it's true. If people would say, is this a true song?

46:04I'd say, oh yes, because it is. And I knew it was true because I got so much feedback from all these people all around the world, all ages, Male, female, didn't matter. So that's to me, especially in the beginning, I felt that was the important thing was that it's a true song, doesn't matter if it happened to me. But then over time, I felt that I felt even though I never lied, I started to feel that it was a burden, that I wasn't being truthful. And so I started to feel that when people as directly as they started to do over time, that it was important. to just say it, simply.

46:46Debbie Millman: After Solitude Standing, you began to move away from your acoustic roots to more electronic, industrial sounds with albums like 99 Degrees Fahrenheit. And at the time, the song Blood Makes Noise felt so radically different from your previous music. And I can imagine that given the global success of your first two albums, your record company must have been like, okay, just keep doing that. But immediately you pivoted and started to evolve. Did that feel liberating or terrifying? It was very liberating. I loved it. And it was my working with Mitchell Froome that kind of made that all come to life.

47:31I felt like I'd been drawing with pastels and doing sort of pencil drawings and suddenly was allowed to play with the big fat crayons, you know, I was like, this is awesome. You know, it was way more than I had imagined. And Mitchell set up an atmosphere where we both felt very free to have ideas, throw them out, do whatever we wanted, amuse ourselves, amuse each other. If I said, oh, I hate that, or what are you thinking? You know, he would just toss that idea out and bring in another idea. So it was a very fertile, wild sort of time. And it felt very liberating.

48:08Debbie Millman: You've had a long fascination with the writer Carson McCullers that has spanned decades. It inspired your play, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, and the album, Lover Beloved, Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers. And I understand you've been intrigued by McCullers ever since college when you read her short story, Sucker. Actually, that was when you were a teenager. I went and read it to get a sense of what that inspiration was. And oh, my God, is that a brutal story. I mean, it's a brutal story. Yeah, it's a brutal story. And also written from the first person in another voice. In another voice.

48:48Debbie Millman: Yeah. Yeah, she writes it from a boy's perspective. A young boy. Yeah, and the language is really tough, and just the title itself, Sucker. You know, I remember thinking, wow, who is this guy? And I read it in the 70s. So it sort of fit in with this sort of tough mood that New York was in, that we were all in back in 1972, 73. So I was shocked to find out this was a song that was written in the 1950s by a girl, by a young woman. I thought, wow. And so I wanted to get closer to this and find out, like, who did this? And then I sort of became her as a game, you know, because Shirley had said, come in dressed as a character.

49:36Come in dressed as a person in the arts who lived, but who's no longer alive, and be ready to field questions as though you're on TV. And so I chose her, and that was big fun. So it's something I return to over and over again.

49:53Debbie Millman: Do you see your theatrical performance work as a continuation of your songwriting voice? You mentioned before that it's still very much about perspective and voice. And I'm wondering if that includes your songwriting voice. Maybe. I think that I'm always working on my performance. You know, I've trained in so many different techniques. I mean, I haven't always mastered them. In fact, I don't think I've mastered any. But I still train myself in them because I want to be a better performer, because I want to earn that spotlight. So that's why I've studied dance and I've tried to study music and I've studied singing and I've studied theater.

50:42So this playing, playing with the play, has been a way of exploring, first of all, what's it like to inhabit someone else's body, language, preoccupations, you know, their life view and get their feelings across? and how do you do that well and how do you express the range of their feelings in the moment? That's what it always comes down to. How do you do this in the moment so it lives in the moment? So in a sense, I've used her life and her character and her work as a way of expressing and exploring the world of feelings and emotions. And I feel that it sort of has helped me in a way to connect with my own emotions.

51:25Debbie Millman: Do you think that McCullough's sense of dual nature mirrors some of your own? Yeah, because as we discussed before, I feel like a kind of changeling, and that means that sometimes I inhabit a male voice, or I inhabit a female voice, or even the way I look physically. Most of the time I have red hair, but sometimes it's blonde, or sometimes it's darker, you know, it's short, long, whatever. So there's a sense of mutability that is also kind of edgy. Mostly I just fell in love with her, her character, her paradoxes. You know, she could be so empathetic in her work and so mean to her husband. Catty and catty.

52:06Yeah, catty and bitchy and mean. Kind of love that about her. Yeah, and needy and, you know, she could be wildly independent and really intelligent and just standing up for other people's rights. But this neediness and needing the love and needing warmth and affection to the point where she would drive people away because there was this kind of grotesque thing that would come out with her, which was, I think that's exciting for a woman to be able to be grotesque in public. And that's what she could be. I mean, it was startling to think that she was so famous in 1940, way ahead of her time.

52:46Debbie Millman: Suzanne, before we talk about your most recent album, Flying with Angels, I want to ask you about some themes that I've heard in your music over the decades. And one is the concept of cold. These are just a few of the lines that appear in your songs over the decades. In Small Blue Thing, you say, I am cold against your skin. And it makes me wonder, you say, to that cold blue flame that you are under. In Straight Lines you say There's a sound across the alley Of cold metal touching skin In Solitude Standing you say By her long cool stare And her silence In Golden you say You are shining like the sun Upon a cold gray sea In Zephyr and I you state In Spring the tide in Riverside Will wash away the cold and frozen You say In 99 degrees Fahrenheit You say something cool against the skin is what you could be.

53:46Debbie Millman: In cracking, soon it will hit the deep freeze. In freeze tag, tickling and trembling. A freeze tag in the dark. And in your new album, in which you state, and I feel the air become bone cold. So talk about the use of cold as a theme in your music. Well, as you said that, my hair is standing up on end with goosebumps. So they got a shiver listening to all of that cold imagery. I was like, oh, I need a sweater. Yeah, it's one of the polarities of life is the cold, hot spectrum. And I run on the colder side of things to the point where my manager teases me about it and says I have ice in my veins, which is, I think he's overdoing it, but, you know, it must come off that way.

54:41I mean, to be cool is kind of sinister. It can be cool in the way we use the vernacular, but it's also kind of bad. You know, it's kind of evil. It's lifeless. It has its own allure because of this. And the world of heat was something I didn't really identify with. uh say my brother tim for example he hot-blooded sweating all the time you know uh very connected to his emotions and we we really were a good team because we ran that gamut he was he embodied like just heat and passion and i'm sort of on that other end of that spectrum by nature i don't know

55:23Debbie Millman: why the new york times described you as clinically a clinically poetic observer And that felt like it was picking up on the coldness. I don't know. I was struck by the use of cold on your first album, Cracking and Freeze Tag, but I've always felt your work to be more intimate than cold. Yeah, I mean, because there's all these other elements. My voice is very intimate. Some of the recordings sound like I'm whispering into your ear. So there's a warmth there. There's a kind of... Yeah, there's a warmth and an informality to elements of the way I perform. But, you know, I still like to have, I'm more formal than not.

56:15Like my daughter points out that I, of myself and my husband, like he's informal, I'm more formal. I prefer a bit of form so we're not all over the place.

56:27Doesn't mean I'm always that way, but yeah, that's how I run.

56:31Debbie Millman: Your most recent album, Flying with Angels, has been considered one of your finest, and it really is extraordinary. It has both some of the classic Suzanne Vega gems, but also the innovative take you to new places, places, spaces. You stated that the album lives in an atmosphere of struggle. And clearly we are living in a time of deep despair, dismay and struggle. What struggle did you most want to illuminate, given how many there seem to be right now? The first one I was thinking of, of course, was the COVID years, because that's where I feel the genesis of this album came from, like 2020. because really in 2019, I was thinking, ah, let's start working on a new album.

57:28And then we turned and faced 2020 and ran into this wall called COVID. I'd never experienced anything like that in my lifetime, where we all had to stay home for two years. And here in New York, it was this very frightening, sterile atmosphere. Everybody left. I stayed with my husband. And then, you know, you'd hear the ambulances go by. and we were all trying to read as much news as we possibly could. So a lot of the songs, Rats, comes from that moment. Mariupol comes from that moment in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some of the imagery from which we're living in a state of permanent emergency comes from COVID, but also comes from the aftermath of COVID because we had a bad situation in our house where my husband's bout with COVID led to a much worse situation.

58:27And of course, then there's been the two elections where Trump got in and then he got in again. All of this, I think, infiltrates the atmosphere of flying with angels. There are personal issues on the album. There are political issues on the album. There's social issues on the album. And then there's little bits of humor and beauty. And beauty, I would hope. Yeah. And then also of a song like Love Thief. It sounds groovy and it sounds kind of sexual, but on the other hand, it also has, there's a little element of politics because it's about the ideology of love as opposed to the ideology of hatred.

59:10And that's embedded in that little song, which you can kind of find if you probe.

59:15Debbie Millman: Yeah, I actually felt like if anybody was going to cover that song, it could be Adele. I would love that. It has a real ballady sort of R &B feel to it. Another of my favorites is Chambermaid, which is a real surprise. And talk about sort of storytelling through different voices. Chambermaid includes the melody of one of my favorite Dylan songs, I Want You. And in that song, he sings, while I return to the Queen of Spades and talk with my chambermaid, she knows that I'm not afraid to look at her. She is good to me and there's nothing she doesn't see. She knows where I'd like to be, but it doesn't matter.

59:59Debbie Millman: The first stanza of your song is, I'm the great man's chambermaid. I've seen where his hallowed head is laid. I revere the places he has stayed and clean crumbs from his typewriter. He is good to me. There's nothing he doesn't see. And he knows where I'd like to be, but it doesn't matter. Yeah. What inspired this duality? Oh, there's a lot of theft going on here. I've always wondered about that chambermaid and about his relationship with her. Like, what is that? Like, is it sexual? Or I mean, they're just talking or like, what is there? Does she clean his room all the time? Like, what's her point of view?

1:00:39I'm always curious to know the other point of view. So I had been doing a lot of housekeeping, which is not my favorite thing, and struggling with my own songs, really running into some writer's block with a couple of them. And I woke up one morning with a song, I Want You, in my head and thinking, I'm Bob Dylan's chambermaid. And I thought, that's an interesting rabbit hole to go down. So I got out of bed and I came into this office here and I thought about that for a minute. I got a little bit of butter on my computer because it was, you know, I made some toast with butter and I thought, oh, butter on the computer, how can I use that on a song?

1:01:20And suddenly I had a sense memory of crumbs on the typewriter because my dad was a writer and he would let me use his electric. And one year I was baking a lot and I must have gotten crumbs on the typewriter and he made me come and clean it. So that popped up and the whole song seemed to write itself in about an hour and a half.

1:01:40Debbie Millman: What was it like to write inside another artist's universe? I love it. And it's so exciting to be there in Bob Dylan's universe, which sometimes just to amuse myself, I will play his songs. I have a little Bob Dylan songbook. I like to sing his songs because then you inhabit them. Like I've done cover versions of It's All Right, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding. And it's an eight minute song and it careens everywhere. And he's so relaxed in his language and he uses phrases and some of them are off the cuff or they're near rhymes or they're maybe not grammatically correct or whatever. And it's so opposite the way I work where I'm polishing every phrase and everything has to be just right.

1:02:32He's so off the cuff that it's a thrill to sing a song like that because you feel like you're careening around these roads of his mind. You know you're safe because you've heard the song, but when you sing it, you're at the wheel of that car and you're just careening and it's a thrill.

1:02:50Debbie Millman: Did you need to get Dylan's permission to use the melody in your song? I did. You toured with him in Norway in 2012. Yeah. So you knew him. You have like inside track. Yeah. And my manager knows his manager. And so I was thrilled to get the approval. He doesn't own his publishing anymore. So we had to also go to the publishers and they approved it with certain caveats. And so it all worked out. You wrote a song titled Lucinda, which is for Lucinda Williams. and you write that you love her because she's blunt and humble. It's an interesting duality also. Well, I think it's very her. She has a kind of swagger about her, but she is also blunt and humble.

1:03:38She also struggles with that feeling of like, do I deserve this? Should I go to the Grammys? I don't have anything to wear. You know, those struggles that you feel when you grow up, working class, female itinerant, itinerant, all of that comes out in her music. So she's all these contradictions, which I like.

1:04:01Debbie Millman: You end the album with a song titled Galway, which feels very much one of the Suzanne Vega melodic gems. Talk about that song and that placement of that song. Yeah, I had fun with the placement of that song because the way we originally structured everything was we started with all the folky stuff and then ended with all the really edgy stuff ending with rats and we had witch back there too and that was too easy because that way people could have their easy listening side and then they could avoid all the difficult stuff later so i changed it all up and i had the first three songs be about current events and i put witch third because i wanted people to understand that this was not going to be just an easy listening experience.

1:04:53So then I thought, oh, let's end with Galway because it's so funny and it's kind of nostalgic and it's kind of a relief after the noise of rats.

1:05:03Debbie Millman: Well, I loved it because it felt like it came really full circle into bringing your entire catalog together. Yeah. And it brings a smile, you know, and people love the melody. And I wrote the chorus really quickly thinking, oh, I'll go back and fix those lyrics. But then I, when I went back, I was like, oh, it works. And it's a look back, but it's also a look forward. You know, it's a look back on something that happened. But Galway is sort of this mystic place that seems to recede into the horizon and is still there waiting for me, for us. So it's the past and the future. Yeah, it felt like you were writing for a real person.

1:05:41Debbie Millman: So I can't help but wonder if he'll recognize himself in the song. Well, we'll find out. sometimes it takes a while for the people to realize uh the guy who i wrote caramel for i mean it took him years before he realized that he was that guy um so i i don't know we'll have to catch up and i'll i'll have to let you know in about a year or two okay yeah i know that luca used to brag that you used his name in the song yeah he had some kind of ownership your daughter ruby Froome sings on the album with you. What was that like? Well, I love hearing her sing. She's a terrific singer, and she went to the High School of Performing Arts and was a vocal major.

1:06:26I love it when she sings with me because she's told me many times that she's internalized my phrasing, so she can match my phrasing perfectly. She really does it there, especially on Allie. and she that choral sound you hear in the back all of that is ruby uh there's a low wow yeah there's a lower male voice that's jerry but the five or six harmony lines that you hear in the back that sound celestial she's doing all of that and she did it herself and came in and she and jerry worked on it and she can just knock that stuff out which i'm i'm always amazed with and She also does the vocals, the background vocals on Mariupol, the low voices and the high ones.

1:07:10So I love singing with her. I wish we could do it more often.

1:07:14Debbie Millman: Suzanne Vega, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you so much. Suzanne Vega's latest album is titled Flying with Angels. She is currently on tour. You can read all about that on her wonderful website, SuzanneVega.com. This is the 20th year we've been podcasting Design Matters, and I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions.

1:07:55Debbie Millman: The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

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