HONG KONG: Hong Kong had recorded over 1.
, a tribute to the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams with some lyrics taken directly from Williams’ memoir. “Bob Dylan’s been an influence since I was nine years old,” Vega says on a recent phone call.
“I remember hearingwhen my third-grade teacher played it for our class. I thought it was beautiful and interesting, and the images stayed with me,” she adds.I Want You ,” Vega says. “And I woke up with the idea that I am the chambermaid today,” she laughs. “And I’m going to write about the chambermaid’s response to being Bob Dylan’s chambermaid.”The song flew out of her, Vega says. “I think I did the whole thing in about an hour and 15 minutes,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it because it’s a pretty dense song, you know, and it’s not an easy narrative there. But I guess I felt like it was something that had been waiting a while that wanted to come out. So that was wonderful.”, Lucinda Williams’ memoir, arrived in 2023. At some point, Vega also came across Williams’ address and phone number, written in her own hand, in one of her old notebooks from the 1980s. “We must have been hanging out at Folk City and just decided to keep in touch, which we then didn’t do,” Vega says. “I’ve performed on the same bill as her more than once, and, of course, I’ve seen her perform many times.” Where Vega had to get permission from Dylan and the publishing company that owns the song she interpolated, she hasn’t yet talked with Williams about the song“I got a Facebook note from one of the guys who works for her, and he played it for her,” she says. “He mentioned there were a couple of nights where, after the load-out, they were all sitting around drinking and listening to the song, including Lucinda.“I thought that was super cool,” Vega says. “I was like, how great.” In an interview edited for length and clarity, Vega talked about her creative process as a songwriter, the common threads that run through her four decades of making records and more.is your first album of new original material in about a decade. Take me through creating these songs. It starts with a writing period. And in this case, we started work on this album shortly after the pandemic began. So we weren’t really allowed to get together until maybe 2021. I write songs in all different kinds of ways. Sometimes it’s a melody. If the melody comes to me and I go, “Ooh, I like this,” I’ll make a voice memo. I’m always keeping notes in my journals. I’m always writing on my phone. “Sometimes I’ll play the guitar, and if I have an idea on the guitar, I’ll make a voice memo demo and send that to Gerry. He makes a spreadsheet out of everything I give him, and then we get together like once a week and play around. Figure out how the song is going. Do we need lyrics, do we need melody work, do we need a bridge or an intro? And sometimes we just listen to music, which is really fun. It can be anyone from Trent Reznor to the Grateful Dead or David Bowie. Just anybody., which references the artist Marc Chagall’s flying characters, though I couldn’t figure out which painting that is.. I kept getting the image in my mind of the Marc Chagall lovers, and then I just decided, well, just put him in the song. The way I see is in this album, you’ve got the ground. The ground is covered in. The images of war and invasion. And also, rats are all over. They’re underground and they’re in tunnels. Then you’ve got everything in between, like Heaven and Earth and Hell. I sort of see it as I’m down here on Earth. There are times that I’d love to escape the pressures that I feel, and so I sometimes long for a kind of transcending. Kind of getting out of the struggles I feel myself to be in. And that’s where I would go. So it’s all of a piece. It’s the sky and the ground and then everything in between. A feeling of struggle also seems to thread through the album. What do you hope a song about tough times can provide a listener?I wrote the song at this point three years ago. I didn’t know we were going to have Trump as president again. I was thinking maybe by the time the album came out the song would be passe. My husband had a very bad case of Covid, which ended in his not being able to speak. He had two strokes that affected his speech centre. Which was ironic because he was a lawyer, and his specialty was the First Amendment. He was a spoken-word poet. SoHe was concerned about all the places that used to be speakers’ corners through the centuries were being paved over and becoming malls. In a sense, this song is my attempt to thread together all these themes of speaking: learning to speak again, who’s able to speak, who’s being silenced. This also comes through inabout them eating through the backseat of a Prius, and that’s such a specific detail it feels like it happened to someone you know.) were real. They’re told to me by someone else or overheard at a party or read about in the newspaper or on the Nextdoor app. “They’re swarming in Barzini’s” – that I read all about online. I’ve had so many anecdotes told to me that I could probably do verse after verse after verse.Yeah. And yes, there is a guy who invited me to Galway once. A long, long time ago in the 1990s, and it’s just like the song. I was like, “No, no, I can’t do that.” But all these years later, I was thinking about him and remembering him and thinking, God, you know what? That could have been really very nice.No, I played a show once, 15 minutes outside of Galway in some field somewhere in the pouring rain. It wasn’t very romantic at all. I’m hoping we’re going to go back to Ireland. I’d love to go see this beautiful landscape that he described to me.That song in particular, and the lines about fate, destiny, and history, really moved me. I find myself increasingly wistful or nostalgic for crossroads moments in my past. Well, I’m so glad. Yeah, I do a fair amount of that these days, too. Like, gee, what if I had done this instead of that? Or something that seemed so insignificant at the time, now I look and it seems meaningful looking back on it. All the time for me, too. I was looking at some of your sets from the fall, and you were playing five or six new songs and then the rest across four decades of albums. Are there threads and themes that all your records have in common? Well, first of all, my life. I used to have this discussion with my stepfather about time and whether time was circular or linear. I have always felt that time was circular. I saw it as kind of a clock that would go around, and you get a chance at things again. It’s not the same, but things come around again. That seemed to really bother him, and he seemed to think that was a really neurotic point of view. . He thought it was cleaner and better to have things linear because then you can leave things behind. Of course, he was a fiction writer, so he was more interested in the narrative. I have found in my life that there are things that repeat. Things that interested me as a child, as a teenager and as a young adult still interest me. The whole idea of solitude versus society, like how do you interact with other people and still maintain your own integrity? That’s something that is constantly coming back.My first album was based on the acoustic guitar, but it was very important to me to mix it with the technology of the time. So the very first thing you hear on the songis Lenny Kaye’s distorted electric guitar. Then there’s the synthesizers going “dink-dink-dink”. So with every album, it has been my intention to mix an acoustic sound with whatever is the technology of the moment. 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