Hold Me Like a Baby

Suzanne Vega and the Wound that Never Heals

In the summer of 1987, I had just finished 8th grade, my peak year of nihilism so far.  I went to a party just because I was in love with my best friend but I couldn’t have her.  And there they were, all the pretty, popular girls, and my stock was low.  I didn’t play sports, I was not just a Jew but a pushy Jew--in Dallas.  I had just finished attending a junior high that looked and felt like a prison.  It was shuttered by the district after I left.  I would soon be off to an arts high school and a better life.

At this party, a song came on that felt like the song of the summer. The voice was whispery, conversational, confrontational.  This was a woman who did not drop her g’s.  She did not sound like she was from around here.  It was from the perspective of an abused child.  It was cold, clear, no sentimentality, no affect.  Suzanne Vega observed, reported, and created a work of art that will evoke raw emotions long after we’re gone.  These popular girls liked the song, too, and sang along.

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

I wondered if these girls were aware of what they were singing about, and I also wondered what kinds of parents they would eventually be.  The song was unflinching, compassionate, without cliché and completely real.  When I was ready for it, I would discover Lou Reed’s Berlin album, which had lines like this:

Caroline says
as she gets up from the floor
You can hit me all you want to
but I don't love you anymore

Berlin was released in 1973, the year of my birth, and “Caroline Says” was not a song 14-year-old girls in Dallas sang at parties, even though it came from a very similar place.   I had seen Lou on MTV with Suzanne Vega, “who I really like a lot,” he said, and he was a tough room.  The world is brutal.  The innocent get battered.  The powerful abuse their power over and over again, and, for most people, the only power they have is in their homes.  I experienced bullying at school and from my older brother.  I experienced bullying from my gym teacher.  The world is filled with frustrated men who despise their powerlessness and take it out on people who can’t fight back.   At 14, I identified with victims. 

Only a few artists could get past the baseline of mediocrity and cliché to tell it straight and direct, and it was a miracle it could happen at all.  1987 was a moment for popular songs about child abuse.  That summer would see the release of 10,000 Maniacs’ “What’s the Matter Here.”  Unlike “Luka,” which is in the voice of the abused child, “What’s the Matter Here” is narrated by an adult.  In college, I had a girlfriend who liked 10,000 Maniacs and took me to see them at Madison Square Garden in 1992.  The song quoted the abused parent:

"If you don't sit on this chair straight
I'll take this belt from around my waist and don't think that I won't use it!"

I was surrounded by women who seemed like moms.  They sang along with these lines pumping their fists in the air like it was catharsis, as if they identified with the abusive parent.  It was as if they thought, “Finally.  A song for me.”

The more I learned about Suzanne Vega, the more I identified with her.  In the fall of 1987, I would find salvation at the Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts, and she went to the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art—the Fame school—as a dance student.  When I got to my arts school, I discovered The Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen, her deepest influences.  I would read the works of Carson McCullers, the subject of her stunning performance piece and album Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers, based on Vega’s play Carson McCullers Talks About Love.  Take a look at a picture of young Carson McCullers.  She’s a dead ringer for Suzanne.  Suzanne is somehow the Suzanne of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” the namesake of Lou Reed’s “I Love You, Suzanne.”  She’s the girl you fall for in summer camp and never get over, and she wrote a song about that, too:

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat

These lines are from “Gypsy.”  She wrote this song at 18, and I still cannot listen to it without tears.   We seek succor, we seek warmth, we seek safety, we seek love.  We seek assurance that things will get better even if it keeps getting harder to believe it. 

She wrote this when she was a camp counselor and had a love affair with another counselor.  The song was a gift, a token to their young moment.

And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day

Vega got her big break in 1984, when she was playing Folk City in Greenwich Village and Stephen Holden wrote a rave review in the New York Times, playing the same role that Robert Shelton played with Bob Dylan.  Soon there was a bidding war between Geffen and A&M, and she went with A&M.  Some poets develop, others unfold, and Vega seemed like the unfolding kind.  I remember walking by the Tower Records at 4th and Broadway and seeing a gigantic cover of her album 99.9.  She recalled meeting someone in front of the store, and not a single person recognized her.  Flaubert said a writer should be like God, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

In the summer of 1992, I lived in Morningside Heights, near the Columbia campus (Vega is Barnard alum), a couple of blocks from Tom’s Diner, which inspired an A cappella song about observing the commonplace and finding grace.  It was hijacked and turned into a dance hit, and she made peace with the bad boys at DNA and worked it out.  This is the song, after “Luka,” for which she is best known.   

She was fully formed on her 1985 self-titled debut, and kept writing excellent songs, through success, then less success, then an album, Songs in Red and Grey, that would commemorate the end of her marriage to producer Mitchell Froom and would be her last for A&M.  She would have to be alone in the world, after sharing the ritual we know too well of taking off that wedding ring and starting over. 

Soap and water
Wash the year from my life
Straighten all that we trampled and tore
Heal the cut we call husband and wife

Daddy's a dark riddle
Mama's a handful of thorns
You are my little kite
Caught up again in the household storms

I cry when I hear this, just as I do with “Gypsy.”  I want to be held like a baby, and I need to figure out a way to start again.  I had trouble parting with my wedding ring, which was owned by my great-great grandmother, who passed it down to my grandmother before she was murdered by Nazis.  That ring is gone forever.

Keep losing further, losing faster. Suzanne Vega keeps reaching for those uncomfortable places of loss, yearning, memory.  She sees you.  She knows what you are doing.  And when she experiences her own loss, she looks you in the eye, observes, and reports.  Vega took her hits, but she kept going.  She made Beauty & Crime, a wonderful album about her native New York for Blue Note, then, with the assistance of Aimee Mann, figured out how to be her own label and reclaim her earlier catalogue with Close Up, an extraordinary series with acoustic guitar (no more interventions by her producer ex-husband), and Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles, which contains “Don’t Uncork What You Can’t Contain,” her debut as a rapper, and a survival kit.  She put it all out there, but she somehow held on to herself.  I met her with her husband, who, in a story worthy of Modern Love, proposed to her before she became famous, then, lifetimes later, he proposed again.  I witnessed the bloom of love in front of me. Love is Vega’s grand subject—needing it, losing it, finding it again, knowing when it is fleeting, knowing when it can last.

I look for you in heathered moor
The desert and the ocean floor
How low does one heart go?

Looking for your fingerprints
I find them in coincidence
And make my faith to grow

McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café, taught me this when I was young:

“Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”

Suzanne Vega got to McCullers well into her career, after the label, the first marriage, the moment when 14-year-old girls are singing along to your song.  She already knew who she was when she started out.

I am cold against your skin
You are perfectly reflected
I am lost inside your pocket
I am lost against your fingers
I am falling down the stairs
I am skipping on the sidewalk
I am thrown against the sky
I am raining down in pieces
I am scattering like light
Scattering like light

The name of this song, on her self-titled debut, is “Small Blue Thing.”  We are meek.  We seek love.  We have to be resilient for the massacre ahead. We have to evoke vulnerability, but we can’t let ourselves be crushed.  I am in awe of Suzanne Vega and Aimee Mann going it alone, beyond the conglomerates, making music that really matters, that continues to evolve, unfold, that keeps getting better, even if 14-year-old girls are no longer singing along. 

Oh Mom, I wonder when I'll be waking
It's just that there's so much to do
And I'm tired of sleeping

I heard this when I was 17.  The song is called “Tired of Sleeping.”  One becomes an adult and still needs to be held like a baby.  Only the muses will actually tell us.  We strut and preen we seek comfort.  One wants to be truly aware that we are here.  Could we be truly awake and observe and report like Suzanne Vega?  The songs know more than we do.  That voice knows me.

Suzanne Vega does not sound like American Idol.  She doesn’t belt.  And we who love her don’t want her to be anything else.  She is confiding in us.  She is giving it to us straight, clear and cold.  She is our Lou, our Leonard.  She knows when we are hurting.   And she can’t stop it, but her mere presence helps us get through. About five years ago, I saw her in Hudson, New York, in a club about the size of the one where Stephen Holden gave her that rave review started her brilliant career.  She sounded exactly the same as she did on those records I grew up with.  That same voice was piercing me more than ever.  We adapt, we survive, we share our vulnerability with the world. “Lover, Beloved/ Each craving the touch/ Each bears the burden/ Of loving too much.”

You will feel it as long as you’re here.  You crave the touch, you bear the burden.  You need reassurance.  You need Suzanne Vega to hold you like a baby that will not fall asleep.