Hi all ,here it is...
Profane and Divine
By SUZANNE VEGA March 31, 2008, 7:17pm,TNYT
Well, let’s see. A blog about “the creative process.” This is a good time to begin this as I have just gotten off the road from promoting “Beauty & Crime,” which was my first album in six years. I had a lot of ideas during that time and not everything made it onto that record, so now I am beginning to splash around and see what’s up for this next one.
You should know that I am usually wary of sharing ideas in progress. I go over and over the lyrics until they feel just right to me, and this can be a very irritating process. I am also a little superstitious — if you talk too much or reveal too much, the spell could fall flat and the song won’t work. However, I have also shared songs, gone back and redone them, had them turn out much better and then forgotten about the earlier drafts. So it happens all different ways.
But listen, readers, don’t steal my ideas, please. I will track you down.
So far, the titles for new songs run like this: “Daddy Is White,” about race in America today; “Avatar,” about aging and spirituality; “Profanity,” about why profanity is good; “Back Alley View,” basically a summary of our last tour; “Pale Cowboy,” about a songwriter I don’t know very well.
Ideas I had left over from before: “Persephone’s Mom,” about a runaway teenager; “Jacob and the Angel,” about that particular wrestling match from The Bible; “The Ballad of Lynndie England,” although a quick Wikipedia read shows me that there have been a few visiting that subject before me; “The Children in the Trees,” about the tsunami of several years ago.
I think “Daddy Is White” is the most developed as it actually has three verses and a chorus. I could even say it’s finished, sort of. So I won’t reveal it here, since it’s mostly finished already.
The most developed one after that is “Profanity,” which begins:
Profanity is my good friend.
It lies in wait beyond the end
Of civilized discussion and
Whatever else you have on hand.
Of course, when I sing it live, it should have a string of profanity between “whatever” and “else” for it to really work.
The other one I like is “Avatar,” which begins:
As though you could tell
This nut from her shell.
I like the original idea of an avatar, an idea from the Hindu that means “the incarnation of a divine being” — the Sanskrit word literally means “to descend.” How I mean this song is, If you don’t like my actual aging face that you see, you can kiss my avatar. Which sounds rude, but means, You can respect the spirit in me, if you can’t admire the flesh. And you can also go on Second Life and interact with my avatar there, which will never age, if you are so inclined.
Well, that’s all I have to report this week. But that’s how I work — a bunch of songs at a time, all of them rolling around the inside of me clamoring for attention. Sometimes they end up relating to one another — a verse from one joins the melody of another other. Sometimes a song from a few years ago suddenly comes springing back at me with surprising vigor.
We’ll see. Hope this album doesn’t take six years to finish, or this blog will end up being as long as “War and Peace.”
Regards Greg
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