Song of the Day 7/11: Suzanne Vega, “Luka”
The literary world was shaken this week when Andrea Skinner, youngest daughter of Canadian author Alice Munro, revealed to the Toronto Star that her stepfather, Munro’s second husband, molested her when she was 9 years old – and that when Munro learned of it 15 years later, she refused to leave him.
The shocking disclosure has readers and critics re-evaluating Munro’s legacy. A giant of Canadian letters who won the Nobel Prize in 2013, Munro is considered a pioneering feminist writer, focusing her short stories – she never wrote a novel – on the inner lives of small-town women and girls. Skinner’s revelation recasts that work in a darker light.
The same is true of Suzanne Vega’s biggest hit, “Luka.” The touching song about an abused boy – released on her second album, “Solitude Standing,” in 1987, though written it several years earlier – hid a secret that changes our perspective.
When the song was released as a single despite Vega’s strong doubts – she dropped it from her live sets because audiences always found the topic depressing – it reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and was nominated for three major Grammy Awards in 1988. When asked about the song’s genesis, for years Vega told a partial truth: Luka was a child from her New York neighborhood, but he showed no sign of being abused. It was simply a difficult subject she wanted to find a way to write about.
She finally started confessing the full truth a few years ago: She wrote so movingly about the subject because the abused child was her. She suffered years of physical and emotional abuse by her stepfather, the author Ed Vega, who died in 2008.
Fun facts: Backing vocals on the record are supplied by Shawn Colvin, and the child actor in the video is Jason Cerbone, who years later played hapless mobster Jackie Aprile Jr. on “The Sopranos.”
