Wednesday March 12, 2008 at 9:33
Suzanne Vega, “Book Of Dreams,” Days of Open Hand
Kevin Fanning wrote:
share a song by an artist who you were introduced to by a friend. And then you say something about that friend.
As I was thinking about this last night, I realized that I first heard many of my favorite bands on MTV, which sounds scarier than it is, since there was a moment when MTV played Midnight Oil, Crowded House, The Smiths, and so on. They also played Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” ad nauseam and I hated that song.
But then in 1990, I was a senior in high school and, for the first time, was dating someone and was in love. And she had a cassette of Days of Open Hand, with a striking Grammy-winning! cover by Geof Kern. So while I fawned over the art, she pressed play and that was the moment I became a Suzanne Vega fan. It scares me that the number of years I’ve been a fan of hers is now greater than the number of years I’d been alive when I heard that album.
(Background vocals by Shawn Colvin, but that wouldn’t mean anything to me for another couple of years, even though her best album was already out.)
That fall I went to college a thousand miles away and got so caught up in everything new there that I did embarrassingly little to keep up with my girlfriend. She sent me a pillowcase and drew wonderful pictures on the cardboard sleeve it came in. I called maybe a handful of times over the course of two and a half months.
When I went home for Thanksgiving, I was so excited to see her but could tell right away that something was wrong. And that night she, quite rightly, broke up with me. I was so spoiled with my first love: she was free of pretense, never given to bouts of drama, and one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.
We would get together for coffee when I was back home, but then she moved to Washington to go to college. In 1995, I took a road trip to visit a friend from college and in the car by myself (maybe listening to Suzanne Vega, a staple of my cassette holder on long car drives), I started thinking about my old girlfriend and realized for the first time how incredibly lame I was. When I got back home, I wrote a scrawling eight-page letter telling her how much she’d meant to me and apologizing belatedly. A few months later I got a nice e-mail in response; she’d gotten married and was about to move to California. We exchanged a couple of short e-mails and then that was it.
Apart from me looking her up on the Google now and again.
