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Luka

music and words by Suzanne Vega

‘LUKA’ BEGINS WITH A BOUNCE, four syncopated synth-pop chords – a sort of glassy marimba tone – leading to an acoustic guitar. But it didn’t always.

In the early 1980s, when Suzanne Vega (b. 1959) wrote and began singing the song that would become her greatest commercial success, it was slower and more intense, befitting a work about domestic violence visited upon a child. Luka was a real boy in an apartment block where Vega lived. Vega didn’t know him personally, and the boy was not, as far as she was aware, mistreated. She simply borrowed his name.

‘My name is Luka,’ he announces through Vega, before going on to tell us things about himself that reveal he is regularly abused. We never learn the identity of his abuser – a parent, presumably, or an older sibling – just that ‘They only hit until you cry’.

It was Vega’s manager, Rob Fierstein, who recognised the song’s potential. The singer herself had doubts. Singing it in concert, she had noticed that audiences tended to tune out. No one ever requested it. Did the subject matter make them uncomfortable or did the slow tempo and somewhat monotonous melodic line leave them cold? Perhaps it was a combination of the two. Either way, ‘Luka’ never seemed likely to be a hit. But Fierstein insisted, Vega acquiesced and the producer, Steve Addabbo, knew what to do next.

‘Help’ had also been a slow song when John Lennon first sang it to George Martin, the tempo more in keeping with the depressed cry of the lyrics. Martin saw that what was needed for it to join the Beatles’ stream of number one hits was a quicker tempo. As usual, Martin was correct, though Lennon continued to bemoan the speeding up.

But Addabbo’s instinct to increase the tempo of ‘Luka’ was not simply about making the song catchier, it also made it more real. The faster tempo brings an air of apparent insouciance to both Vega’s lyric and her singing of it, and, paradoxically, adds poignancy. There’s a defensiveness to Luka, as there might well be with a child who is being physically assaulted by a family member. Aided by the brightness and breeziness of the music, Luka brushes off his neighbour’s concern: ‘I walked into the door again’; ‘It’s not your business anyway’; ‘Just don’t ask me how I am’.

Addabbo was only responding to what was already in the song. As Vega once said, ‘It’s not a song about an issue; it’s a song about a kid’, and from the beginning she had known that a major key was required. In his apartment, Luka might be frightened some of the time, but when we meet him – when he tells us his name and that he lives upstairs – he’s a chatty little boy.

There’s no chorus in this song, just four verses. There’s a guitar solo by Jon Gordon between the second and third verses, and a longer version of the same at the end of the song. The first three verses are each in two parts (AB), the fourth verse is extended (ABB). In fact, it’s the first verse again, with the B part of verse two tacked on. The guitar solo and the final verse are particularly significant in terms of the surprisingly optimistic mood of the song.

Gordon seems to be emulating U2’s guitarist the Edge, not only with his jangly tone, created by effects pedals and the use of first the high E string and then the B string as pedal points, but also in his strumming patterns and the way he frequently anticipates the beat.

Vega’s vocal delivery is in character. She’s the boy who would prefer not to meet your gaze, and the range of her melodic expression is appropriately narrow – chatty but downcast. At the beginning of verse four (the repeat of verse one), this is especially apparent. But then comes that extra half verse, the B section of verse two and perhaps the song’s most arresting words: ‘They only hit until you cry / After that, you don’t ask why.’

The song is in the key of F sharp major, and the first time we heard that line, the melodic line to the words ‘[After] that you don’t ask why’ dropped through a minor seventh, from G sharp to A sharp before curling back up to place ‘why’ on B – the subdominant. But on this final appearance – the very end of the song – the line only descends as far as C sharp, climbing back up (on ‘ask why’) to E sharp and F sharp – the leading note and the tonic. It’s a small moment, perhaps, but in a song that is all about reading between the lines, it’s a moment of hope and even imminent triumph. Whatever is happening to Luka at home shouldn’t be happening. He is being hurt until he cries. But that little upturn at the end of the song – whatever the words may say – reassures us that he will survive. Those two melodic notes – E sharp and F sharp – make the song bearable.