The Creative Independent

Which came first? The solo songwriting or collaborating with others?

I started collaborating first, kind of by a long shot. All my siblings play music. We spent many years and many hundreds of hours, just in our parents’ basement, playing Sublime and Weezer covers. All rotating on instruments. When we were kids, my brother Elliot was the natural front...

How are you?

Great. A little behind. My son’s home and he wanted a thousand things. And I was like, “No, I have to shower.” You might see cats. You might see kids. I have a play date arriving at noon. I don’t know. We just don’t know. But whatever. I love when things just naturally work out.

Maybe that’s a good place to start: How do y...

Being a translator is confusing to most people. How did you get into this line of work?

The way I like to put it is that it’s being the business class version of a reader. If there’s a book in a foreign language that I really want to get to the bottom of and really want to spend an enormous amount of time with, the best way to do that in a way that do...

Can you speak about collaboration in your work? You have a music director for your band, but I think when people think Suzanne Vega, they think singer/songwriter, which is a very solo thing. You’ve worked with some really dazzling people, and I’m just curious: how do you go from singer-songwriter to collaborator?

Well, I wrote my first song when I was...

I would describe you as a writer who has made a career out of exploring the creative lives of others. How have your questions about what enables a creative life changed since you started?

I hope that my questions have gotten a bit deeper over time. I think starting with a look at writers’ and artists’ routines and working habits is a fairly surface le...