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 >> I remember clearly the first time I heard Suzanne Vega's music. I was coming home from another practice of my basketball team and I turned the car radio on at my favorite station in those days, 'Rádio Delírio' (Radio Delirium). It was 11 o'clock in the evening and the show which was about to start offered an alternate listening of two albums which were not available in Portugal at the time. The host had the habit of never identifying the albums in question at the beginning of the show and so the songs glided along without any interruption. 

 >> I recognized the band which opened the show that night. It was Cathal Coughlan's Microdisney, who, curiously enough, continued on to form a band which had my name on it, The Fatima Mansions. But the song that came next was like a revelation. It seemed to me that it had a perfect blend between words and music and, above all, a subliminal feeling of imminent interior turbulence, transcended by the purity and the unpretentiousness of the voice. I didn't know it then, but that song was called "Cracking", and all the other songs I heard on that April night of 1985 left in me an acrid taste of insidious tension. I felt the truth about them and the life that was inscribed in them. An hour later I got to know the name of that voice and some days later I knew that voice's face.

 >> Since then I never lost track of that voice and that face. I let myself become fascinated by the attitude and the way of being and feeling. By the urgency that a song can have. By the words and the way they got themselves involved with the music in a game of mutual illumination. Suzanne has always known that the territory of words is a reality too concrete and always lacking. She has tried to restore that absence by searching for its possible fluidity and by walking close to the sharp edge that separates the "crust of the meaning", which words seem to be, from "the realms never touched, never stirred" that they definitely contain underneath. Writing, for Suzanne, is a continuous walk on that waterline of a thousand faces and an endless discovery of the entrance door to the big interior space that it hides. Always listening to the creak that lets the tale begin.

 >> I have always felt that songwriting involves something mysterious, because a song, when it's good, is capable of grabbing us and binding us to it, and many times we don't even understand why or how. That mystery is what confers the fascination and the individuality to a song. Suzanne's songs are filled with that mystery and, precisely because of it, they offer to the listener a supreme gift: the freedom of being able to decipher it and eventually recognize that that mystery can never be totally solved. And the reward that comes from that task is always immense. Watching her songs grow and letting themselves be known in a time and dimension all of their own. Finding out in them the several layers of meaning, the sense of humor, the precision, the angles of light, the corners of shade, the currents of feelings.

 >> In the first American edition of Suzanne's debut album there is a word etched into the run-out groove on the B side of the vinyl. That word is, very significantly, "Freedom". Freedom to live and be human as the characters on that album strove for, but also freedom to go through a song in the way each person has chosen to pursue. That's why many of Suzanne's songs are written from a point of view. In that way, there is always room to breathe inside them, time to build a perspective and a way of living with them.

 >> When I began to draft the book dedicated to Suzanne in the collection 'Rei Lagarto' (Lizard King), I wanted it to be like her songs. I wanted it to offer room for everyone to build their point of view. I wanted it to open up reading and listening possibilities. I didn't want to explain anything, not even imply that I have the certainty of anything at all. Suzanne's songs are songs in constant movement. I just wanted to follow their track and join them in their motion for some time. Where those songs are going, nobody really knows.

original portuguese version published in "a phala", december 1993.

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