it just occured to me today, after all these years, that 'Liverpool'(especially the second half, is a chord progression which is most similar to The Beatles' 'She's So Heavy'(end chords)..............
larryt

Ya know... you're right! And this is just one more example of the (as yet undocumented) Suzanne/Beatles connection.

Two Retrospective tour clips of In Liverpool can be seen at

Northampton, MA - Calvin Theatre
http://homepage.mac.com/mooncusser/Vega/iMovieTheater77.html

Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club
http://homepage.mac.com/mooncusser/Vega/iMovieTheater86.html

I remember the time when i was lucky to hear and catch audio of beautifully performed "In Liverpool" on MTV's "Most wanted" with Ray Cookes (I also remember hem having himself in a bath full of beans at some other occation).
I think was bit of scared at those times.Something was coming up to it's end, and i strongly felt there are heavy storms to come,long years of nothing,and when we see blue sky again we'll be old and cold eyed.Seemed like allmost nobody felt this way.War spirits were high and madness around..
Something good is not to be listened so often,but every time i hear it it takes me back to this time when i felt more like human and which i love to recall.
In fact,that's the only version i know ,but i can't imagine better version than this one.



Boban

I just picture Suzanne all alone on a very quiet afternoon really zoning in on these bells; scrutinizing the overtones, and being generally overwhelmed by the intensity of the sound.

She makes this direct connection with the bell ringer. He's a crazy passionate performer, and she's his audience. He's putting his all into those bells and maybe everybody else in Liverpool is taking it for granted, but some girl in a hotel room is really feeling it.

I love this song because it presents this idea of contemplative solitude... a lone woman finding the intensity of a very ordinary day. Yet it also presents this idea of a personal connection... He's touched her from a distance... almost like the bells of a telephone, but it's a one way communication. She can't answer back to that boy in the bellfry...

except to write, record, publish, and distribute a song that he may or may not ever hear.

And in both cases, each person has touched countless other lives in the process.

I still have this strange curiosity about which cathederal features in In Liverpool? Real or a third imaginary one?

What makes a songwriter good in my opinion, is when different people get different meanings and fealings out of a text. And i really like the way you interpreted the text Patrick. I must admit that Liverpool hasn't been one of my really favourite songs, but it made a real impression to me when Suzanne told the story behind the song at a concert I was on.

It's some years ago since I heard the story, so please correct me if I'm remembering something wrong. Suzanne used to work at a summercamp. At one of these camps, she met a guy that also was working there. It turned out that he also liked Leonard Cohen, and Suzanne fell in love. (not that many men that are charming, and actually like Leonard Cohen..hehe)I don't remember if this was her first love, but I think it was. The problem was that this guy came from Liverpool, and after the camp he went back home. So this song is dedicated to him. If I remember right, he had told Suzanne about a cathederal which was situated just around where he lived, and how he could hear the ringing from the bells at home.

Love Linda

I think you are getting confused with Gypsy. Although I think he is kind of hanging around on the fringes of In Liverpool, it is actually Gypsy that is the one that is specifically about him.

In Liverpool is about the same guy.

Suzanne once said: "I don't know how he ended up with two songs"

Diary pages say: "....is this the river Mersey that Andy [note: in the live reading on the Retrospective UK bonusdisc 'Andy' is substituted with 'my old boyfriend' -Spikey]once told me about? I thought of him today as the bus rolled into town, how homesick he was for Liverpool, for the big clock that always told the same time...."

I don't know if this Andy person could hear the bells from his apartment. That would be weird, Suzanne writing in her diary about her old boyfriend and he hearing the same bells at the same time...(if he was at home then)! But again, I never heard her say that.

Spikey.

I'm new to the undertow-board and have just begun to be a more "detail-interested" fan of Suzanne Vega.
I heard "In Liverpool" last week for the very first time. Actually I saw it on her Retrospective Sound and Vision DVD.
The ending of the song reminds me of The Smiths, but it can surely be that The Smiths liked the Beatles very much. But being a hardcore-fan of the Smiths for the last five years, that kind of guitar-playing is so typical for Johnny Marr that I wonder who plays the guitar on that song, Suzanne herself? Is there a chance that she likes The Smiths?

I remember reading an article from the mid-80's stating that Suzanne listened to a lot of modern music, and it even named The Smiths and The Police! I also noticed the similarity in the style for In Liverpool, but I felt it the other way around, because I heard the song before I became a big Smiths fan. To answer your question about who plays In Liverpool, Suzanne plays the lead accoustic, and is backed up by Tchad Blake, Richard Pleasance, and David Hidalgo on electric guitars on the album (Bruce Thomas plays the bass part, while Jerry Marotta plays drums and Mitchel Froom is keyboards). The video may be set to a different recording, but I doubt it. (I don't know, since I just ordered my copy this morning.)

Hi Dino,

Welcome to the Undertow!

Ryan already said the essential, I just want to add that Suzanne referred, in several public interviews, Morissey as one of her "heroes" in song lyrics. I'm also almost sure I read somewhere she mentioning The Smiths as a reference.

But about "In Liverpool" I would say something slightly different. Johnny Marr created a way of playing that became a true trademark. And as it always happens with classics, you always find features in other works that remind you of them, even when the authors of these works were not completely aware. That's what make them classics.

Just my opinion...

José Carlos
-----------
Keats and Yeats are on your side
But you lose
'Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine

---

http://www.vega.net
http://setlists.vega.net
http://rustedpipe.vega.net

Thanks for the infos.
Take a look:
http://www.morrissey-solo.com/articles/02/06/19/14 18224.shtml
But thou must beware, their language is a bit foul!

I guess all this explains why I both Suzanne and Morrissey are my two biggest idols. I must be the kind of person who falls into that little subsect of romance where they overlap.

Me, I don't care about the specific guy this song was written about. To me it's that feeling of longing that was the inspiration. We all have that first experience of love that follows us and informs our heart for the rest of our lives.

This song, as well as many Smith tunes, bring me back to that beautiful torch that still glows somewhere in my heart for that first blush of love and heartbreak.

I could not afford to be as pessimistic as morrisey, though he was the closest thing to an honest songwriter from the time I listened to the Smiths.

In Liverpool is about gypsy? OK because it really stirs me due to coincidences in the lyrics. The boyfriend of a friend of mine did actually throw himself down from a tower, with a belfry, in the middle of Oxford though. What can I say it was a tragedy, he was schizophrenic. That's why this song made me cry.

Also my Great Grandad was a Liverpudlian docker and quarter of my family comes from there. So it puzzled me.

I thought the chorus lyric was a joke at first, like a kind of beatnik stream of consciousness poem, because most single bells are rung by machines nowadays and for peals campanologists have to work in teams and the bell ringers dont go up into the tower so they cant throw themselves down and they certainly cant keep on doing it! So it has to be figurative and not literal ! I thought it was about the way peals run down the scale. A peal of bells touches you close to the heart and is this why the lyrics then talk about heaven and missing someone?

The reference to the hunchback has to be Quasimodo, ie dont judge the goodness of the heart by appearances. He yearned for Esmerelda and through her perhaps to have acceptance (like John Meyrick, the Elephant man) and the figure of the singer is missing someone in the same way, perhaps feeling rejected.

So the strange chorus takes you from a peal of bells through to the state of the heart which the bell's purity, symbolic of heaven, pains because it reveals what the listener/singer would rather forget. So it made me cry for that reason too.

Does that make sense ?!

But really you say its Suzanne thinking about a story told her by a boy she loves and she is the one going crazy. She is the one throwing herself into melancholy like that fella on the tarot card.

Well we've all been there !

You know there are some lyrics you just shouldnt try to make sense of.