Interview with Tina Vero.

by Jen Snow

December 2000

Tina Vero's been there too. Like many students, she made the long trip from one part of the state to another to attend Rutgers University. She attended classes and took the double E bus and ate in Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus and lived in one of the curiously large rooms in Demarest Residence Hall. She came back to the University and the bus stops and the students and the basement of her old residence hall to release her first album a few weeks ago. Maybe we each don't have an album of our own, but don't be surprised if you do have something in common with Ms. Vero. Listening to her album, "In The Waiting," is like listening in on her life - and not because she's gushingly confessional, but because her songs are so honest and so open in conveying a feeling, a hope, an image. The album lets her audience in, even more deeply than talking to her one-on-one could, because her words and music are her consciousness, or stream of consciousness as it may be.

"When I sit down and write I'm trying to work something out," Vero said. "It's kind of like meditation with a priority. There are writers that are very concrete and there are writers that are more abstract, and I have a deep appreciation for both."

She said that she sees certain things, and they'll hit her and she'll take that - whatever it is - and try to use her image and feeling as a way of opening that up to the listener.

"The songs that are on "In The Waiting" really came out of my experience at Rutgers," she said. "A lot of relationships I had, a lot of friendships that impacted me. College is an amazing place and time, but it's also a time filled with the impatience of being in limbo."

She said that anticipation definitely makes someone hesitate and doubt your every move.

"You are in your early 20s and you think, "What am I going to do next? Where is this going to lead me?" You're always waiting for something big to hit. "In The Waiting" just sort of picked itself as the title track to the 10-song cycle."

Vero came to Rutgers in 1994, the same year she first picked up the guitar. And it was here that she joined a fellow student (Rich Boniface, Rutgers College Class of 1998) she heard singing through the thin residence hall walls late one night. The Indigo Girls and harmonies abounded, a friendship was formed, and the two eventually began not only to perform in the residence hall, but in public as well.

Vero was here at a time when coffee shops welcomed folk singers and open-mic nights abounded year-round. "I am totally willing to play at every dorm at Rutgers," she laughs. "It's hard for me to book in New Brunswick in the winter months because I'm not bar music. And people that are under 21 can't get into the bars anyway, so I'm a big banner-waver of bringing house concerts to the college scene. That's the kind of setting in which folk music could flourish."

And Vero is clearly a folk singer in the most fundamental essence of the term. Why else would she return to New Brunswick to release her first album?

"I've always seen music as a way of getting through things and processing experiences, and in performing I'm trying to take those experience and hand them off to the audience, which is an integral part of what I do. I'm very interested in the passing off of the package; I made the album as a way of giving my song-cycle continuity, and I perform live music as an exchange. With an audience I may improvise or tell stories or even spontaneously rap because I'm always looking for the connection. I have a feeling and I want to convey it, but I want to listen to the exchange as well."

It's easy for students to believe in this honesty because they've been there too. They sit in classrooms Vero sat in, they live in the residence halls she lived in, they've taken lessons and written songs of their own. Right now, in college, students are "In The Waiting." Vero's finished waiting; she's ready to come back.

"And so I'm glad to come back to New Brunswick, which has always been sort of a magical place for me," she says, "because it's here that I found my pulse. And as a musician, pulse is everything."