The first time I heard this on CD, I thought the music was so great that i upgraded from my air guitar to a fly swatter bass. This definitely makes my top 5 SV songs.
Now as far as the lyrics go, I kind of identify with it, as my own marriage "drowned" in the year this song was written, 2001. In the song, "I keep returning to the very area where I did see the thing go down" refers to NYC for me. NYC definitely played a big role in the break-up between me and my ex-wife. We had an apartment there and I had a house in Westchester. She loved the city and hated the 'burbs, and i was the total opposite. Love could only make that last 9 years for us.
When we were breaking up, I went on several dates in the city with Oriental women who also lived in the city.
Well, i wanted Oriental women, and that's where most of them are. But evenutally I met one in China and the rest is history.

Right now, there's a lunar eclipse happening during my birth sign, so take this for what it's worth:

I just had this semi-pseudo wild experience.

The year Suzanne's "Widow's Walk" was released, I was walking my own "widower's walk", so to speak (and what a 2 year walk that was).

But I didn't hear this song until this year. And I didn't meet Suzanne until this year. A photo of us together sits on 1 of 4 speakers in my "chill out" room, where a good music transmitting entity, WFOX, seems to breathe.

As "Widow's Walk" was playing, I did my usual role, which I do both live at her shows and here in my room with the red neon light as the sole lighting, where i play air guitar and sing backing vocals to the line "point to fail".

Now I've listened to an excessive amount of Cros-Nash harmony, so I've been "schooled" in resonating harmony, so to speak.

Man, my voice was resonating through my whole body (and maybe the new walls too

clipart{uhoh})on on "fail" \Like "faiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiail".

I flipped through "Songs In Red & Gray" to one of my favorites, "Harbor Song", for some type of closure.

While the song was playing, i seemed to think i got it.

Perhaps in the afterlife, the souls of Suzanne and mine are gonna commune with those of CSNY (incl. Buffalo Springfield), Jefferson Airplane(incl. Hot Tuna), Strawberry Alarm Clock, etc., and WFOX will go on in the afterlife. If I believe in that, then I can shake my fear of being mortal.

Thus, I'd be able to take GOOD music with me beyond my grave.

Imagine that !

(it's a nice eclipse we're having. by the way)

WFOX (eternal home of CSNY, Hot Tuna & Suzanne Vega)

PS Moral of the story: i'm enjoying life right now, and i hope all of you who enjoy and appreciate Suzanne's music can enjoy and appreciate life now also, perhaps in part to Suzanne's work....

But I guess you could say I'm also worried, for we've walked some of the same "rough walks" everso surrealistically together...

i'm just hoping she's okay.....

A long time ago I was hanging out with an old friend of mine here in town and we were out walking late at night. We went past an old wooden mansion, it looked like a haunted house. It had one of those cupola's up there on the roof, like a look-out tower, and there was a small balcony around it.

My friend said, "They call that a widow's walk".

Now I can't listen to this song without picturing Suzanne all wrapped in a shawl, pacing around on the rooftop of an old house by the sea, like a hermit, perhaps holding a little lantern.

This song rocks bit time. Too bad Rupert Hine overproduced it so extremely and KILLED IT. It's really much better if it's just the lyrics and guitar. Same for Penitent.

-M

I'm really starting to dig the Hine productions on this album. They're so "big"... they require some perspective to really appreciate - like a huge mural that looks best from several blocks away.

This album has aged well for me. I like it better now than last year, and will like it better still next year.

That having been said, I can't think of an album of Suzanne's where the producer didn't take things to some extreme or another. I'd like to finally hear one alubm where the producer just sort-of hangs back and let's things sound-out naturally - not too stark, not too mystic, or mechanical, or dramatic. I'd like to hear one that just played it straight.

Haunting and beautiful. Suzanne's voice has the ability to melt my heart.

I had to write about this song again. I still despise the Rupert Hine overproduction on it, but that's okay because I also have the UK 2-disc retrospective as well as a garbly recording of her doing it live for some radio station in the U.S. months before SiRaG was ever released, and those 2 versions are much more listenable to me.

Anyway, the thing is I wanted to say how much this song really really really has helped me.

I've had a really really hard life in some ways and my early adulthood years (mid 20s until now and right now I am 32) threw me an unbelievable string of tragedies and rude awakenings, so I look at it like I was in really choppy waters to begin with, to tie in with Suzanne's sea metaphor in the song. God, the song was a really good METAPHOR, not a simile, and she carried it so well, but back to the point...

So, I got in a relationship with somebody from another country and it got crazy with immigration status and drama and we both lost family members during this time, etc. etc. We finally got the Canadian immigrant status we applied for, so we could remain together, but when we started our journey Northward to become landed immigrants, we had a technical problem with some trailer equipment we had rented and our car ended up flipping over 3 times. This is sharply analogous to Vega's shipwreck metaphor (except that we LITERALLY had a wreck) and the fact that we had been through so much together and were both so tired ties into what Vega said about the "ship [being] empty before it hit the rocks" because we were both so tired from our trials and tribulations that we were practically non-existent zombies before the accident and no longer really "in the relationship" (the ship) on so many levels.

So anyway, the accident WAS very bad, I almost died, had to get a helicopter really quick (really got lucky b/c the response time was INCREDIBLE) because I was losing lots of blood and getting numb and going cold in my extremities which is definitely on the road to death. I had to have lots of emergency trauma care as well as reconstructive surgery on my scalp because about 1/3 of it was taken off. Luckily, my partner didn't have any major cuts or anything like that, however his resulting back problems have been worse than mine.

Not that this is relevant, but nearly everything we both owned was kept in an impound lot for the better part of a year because of the legal investigation. We did sue a major corporation that was at fault and we did win (not a whole lot of money, and actually they settled before any trial, so technically we didn't really "sue".) But our whole possessions were on the line and we were starting to think that we would never see them again. A thief did end up breaking in and taking SOME stuff (lots of CDs and DVDs, but thankfully, nothing really ESSENTIAL). But that is nothing compared to the bigger picture.

But honestly, this song is written from such wisdom and experience and it's such a great bit of guidance and it really has helped me keep perspective.

A lot of people (especially those who really don't pay close enough attention to Vega's lyrics) may typify SiRaG and "Widow's Walk" as whining or bitterness or whatever, but honestly, there's a lot of maturity and perspective behind it - it's not at all like she's this angry, scorned woman because she actually never BLAMES her ex-husband or anything or, very ostensibly, shows lots of anger towards him or anything.

I also want to point out certain parts of the song where I feel like she really knows what she's talking about and isn't bulls***ing because I do the exact same thing...

"Though I saw it splinter
I keep looking out to sea,
Like a dog with little sense,
I keep returning,

To the very area where
I did see the thing go down
as if there's something at the site
I should be learning.
"

The above is very true, at least for me, because I keep ruminating about the relationship and keep thinking back to the wreck...maybe not so incredibly often because it was a very painful thing, and I don't think or feel it too intensely either, because it's too much, but there is an element of obsessiveness about it and there are many reasons for that including, but not limited to, the desire to learn from the wreck.

The chorus "That line is the horizon.
We watch the wind and set the sail,
but save ourselves when all omens
point to fail."
could hardly be better written or chosen. I look to the past and I look to the present and I look to the future and they are all points on the horizon. Watching the wind is analogous to being cautious about the present and the future, but when things look really bad, the sad fact is that the grosser part of human nature is to save one's own butt first, as she says in the latter part of the chorus. I know that such was true for me, anyway.

And the last verse is just perfect. Although the lookout is not so rosy (she has to ASK, even if only rhetorically "Does the weather say a better day is nearing?"), there is at least enough nerve to think that such could be possible and the knowledge of the imperfect self as expressed in "cause it's clear that I need better skill in steering" is the perfect mantra for remaining sober.

I could talk about how I really like her somewhat jazzy phrasing in the song - how the rhymes are there but delivered far apart in the song (and we who love "Rosemary" to death and analyze the form-content synthesis in it and how that ties in to her amazing songwriting talent KNOW this) and how she unconventionally uses substantial pauses between in-between actual lines to better show time and complication and coming to consciousness and understanding about her issues, but as important as that is to show that she is such a great talent and worker, it's just academic stuff which many other people on this board already understand and such is really secondary to my main point and why I write this...

That the song is really vital to sharing one's pain and one's experiences to help reach out to other people and take us out of that lonely place, and that she does it SO WELL, and that I think the best thing I can do, personally, is to tell her, via posting on this board, how much her art and work mean to me and how much she has helped me through them.

Happy belated Birthday Suzanne, and thank you for EVERYTHING!!!!!!!

Sincerely,

"Milo" / Will

Hey Will,
Thank you for that moving post. I have been fortunate enough not to know tragedies in my life, at least nothing half as serious as yours, so I can only try to vaguely grasp how you feel about this song. I myself just turned 30 last month, just changed jobs, am happily married for the past 2 years and I live outside the range of the rocket bombs that are now raining over northern Israel, so I consider myself lucky.
last week I decided, on a whim, to take SiRaG with me on a car trip, put it in the car's CD player and it's still there. It's been years since that magical day I bought this CD and listened to it for the first time, and listening to it again (not just hearing it in the back of my consciousness) was a real homecoming for me. Not only did it remind me of a time when I was a different person, the songs themselves have new meanings to me today, and I relate to the music in a different way in my new place in life.
And still, I cannot reach the levels of connection to the lyrics as you have eloquently described yours, which makes me envious of your experiences on the one hand, and grateful for the fact that they are not mine on the other hand.
So once again, thank you for sharing your thoughts so brilliantly with me and whoever else is reading this thread. Your description is very Undertow, I must say; I've noticed that a lot of Towies are very concise when writing about the turmoils in their private lives...

Take care now, y'hear?

Yuval =8-)

Yuval:

Thank you so much for your kind words. I do fear that at times, I share too much and that it's not an admirable thing for me to do. But at other times, I think it's important to share for the very same reasons that Suzanne sings about the things she sings about, although she does a much better job of not bleeding all over the place the way that I do.

I actually known what you mean about simultaneously envying and not envying somebody else's pain and experience. While I've been through a lot of things that NOBODY would want to go through, I can also honestly say, disgusting as it is to say it like this, that I am fortunate just because I am a white, working/middle class male in North America. I know that it has been an awfully long time since Americans and Canadians have experienced or been subjugated to all-out war on our home soil, and this makes us different and insulated from much of the rest of the world. I would like to compare this back to what you were saying, but that would be treading dangerous ground. I feel both guilty about this as well as thankful.

Nevertheless, we can all be thankful for people like Suzanne who put their voice out there and share their wisdom, pain, observations and spirit and who bind many of us together. We are truly fortunate in this way.

Right now, in my convalescence from my surgery (as I mentioned on another thread), I am having to look at life as something in which some of us are indebted to and have to accept a state of grace. Suzanne is a source of such grace, as is Eudora Welty, a writer (from my hometown) whose biography I am reading right now.

I just wish that more people in the world, (right now, I think of both Lebanese and Israelis, Iraqis and many others) were as lucky in these ways. I wish for them that the weather really does say that a better day is nearing.

-M

Amen to that.
There's this email that's going around that compares the world to a small village of 100 people, in which only 6 have a car, 30 can't even read and a good few are in a constant state of starvation (my numbers may be off, I can't remember). This email goes on to say that "if you received this email, consider yourself lucky because you have a computer, you know how to read, and you are educated enough to understand the point. Only 500 million people in this 7-billion-people world of ours are so fortunate".
Despite the wars, the famine, the problems and disasters, I take great comfort in the fact that our civilization is currently at its peak, and advancing all the time. Just imagine - 500 million educated human beings on earth who have enough to eat every day. Wow.
Maybe I should be writing this post in the Last Year's Trouble thread... ;-)

Yuval =8-)