Almost a year ago exactly, the legendary noise punk artist and Suicide front man Alan Vega died in his sleep after taking a fall and breaking his hip. He was 78 years old. Vega left behind a legacy of music that influenced some of the biggest names in the, including Henry Rollins and Bruce Springsteen to name a few. Unbeknownst to almost everyone beside a select few, he left behind something else too. In his last years, Vega worked hand in hand with his wife Liz Lamere to create one final album. He called it, IT and its available everywhere on Fader Records on July 14.
Though his health declined significantly in his final years, especially after suffering a stroke that made it somewhat difficult to communicate verbally in 2012, Vega kept up his habit of creating just for the sake of creating right up until the very end. “He wrote every night,” Lamere said, when I spoke to her over the phone recently. “It was a nightly ritual. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I have to record an album and I have to come up with lyrics.’ He was just constantly writing.”
In addition to constantly creating words, Vega remained utterly fascinated and totally involved in chasing and creating new “soundtracks” as Lamere calls them. “He would kind of have an idea, ‘This would be Song A, Song B, Song C,’ whatever,” She said. “He would have maybe eight or nine tracks that would be part of a composition that would be that song. It wasn’t like we were randomly pulling tracks, although I have done that with a song. ‘Nike Soldier.’ I literally randomly pulled tracks to make the song.”
A lot of the sounds Vega assembled that made up the songs you hear on IT were directly culled from the sonic morass of the city he loved and called home. “He often would just record sound in the subway, in the streets,” Lamare said. “He walked around the streets late at night. Under the Brooklyn Bridge where there’s kind of that whirling. Just whatever he heard that sounded different. He always had his little recorder with him and would do that. And he’d come in the studio and would throw that onto a track and then run that through something else. There’s a lot of stuff that’s vocals that you can’t even identify as vocals because he ran it through a lot of different things.”
For those who’ve followed Vega’s work over the span of decades, you may notice a return to a number of familiar themes and messages that have remained a near-constant throughout his creative life. New songs like “Screamin Jesus” where Vega snarls, “The red, white, and blue is destroyed,” instantly recall a similar line on the earlier cut “Ghost Rider” from the self-titled Suicide record that debuted in 1977: “America is dead. The world is dead.” “There were universal themes,” Lamere noted. “If you’re looking at it superficially, you think, ‘Oh, doom and gloom.’ This man had such depth of beauty, the vision was really life. It might look like this, a lot of sh*t going down right now, but you’ve gotta dig deep and you have to be true to yourself.
For example, “If you listen to the song ‘Prophecy,’ and if you read the lyrics and you see the pattern of how it progresses, the actual message is very positive. When you talk about vision, if you destroy the vision, you will suffer the whirlwind. You have to rise above. We’ve all been knocked down. We’ve all had adversity and challenges. But I will stand. I will go on. That’s my prophecy.”
Even while the sounds remain foreboding — a clashing, clanking din of discordant noise — and the words themselves wholly caustic, there is indeed an underpinning of hope that runs throughout IT. Just like with his formidable band, Vega desired to hold a mirror up to the ills of society so that people were better equipped to confront their masters. “Suicide wasn’t about committing suicide,” Lamere noted. “Alan used to joke that it was the longest suicide in history. What they were saying is, we as a people are committing suicide by giving in to, ‘Oh, sh*t, the city’s in bankruptcy and Nixon is f*cking us up and we’ve got the Vietnam War and let’s just do heroin and let’s just zone out. We’re not going to entertain you so you can forget about what’s happening. You have to recognize that there’s sh*t going down. There always will be. But wake up!”
While IT remains the last record that Vega consciously worked on in during his life, his archives are bursting with never-before-heard material that he cultivated throughout the years, and Lamere is optimistic that some of it might get released in the not-too-distant future. “Alan and I had talked about that,” she said. “There’s a ton of stuff in the vault and Fader is aware of that. And I think there’s going to be interest.” Adding, “I like the idea of maybe inviting people to collaborate, to come in and hear some tracks and do a collaboration or whatever. There’s a journey ahead that Alan will be involved.”
Here’s the artwork and full tracklist for IT:
1. “DTM”
2. “Dukes God Bar”
3. “Vision”
4. “IT”
5. “Screamin Jesus”
6. “Motorcycle Explodes”
7. “Prayer”
8. “Prophecy”
9. “Stars”
IT is out July 14 on Fader Records. Pre-order it here.
