Suzanne explaing the mood of "In Liverpool":
"It's a little sad, but it's not as sad as it seems to be. It's actually a romantic fantasy, based on one Sunday that I had in Liverpool two years ago. Where I was lying on the bed in a hotel room listening to the bells ringing outside the hotel room, I was thinking about an old boyfriend that I had, that I knew about fifteen years ago. So I was remembering him. It's like a nostalgic song. It's a romantic song."
Interview in The Language Magazine (http://www.vega.net/language/922sthlm.htm) transcribed by Steve Zwanger

On the inspiration to write the song:
"This was one I wasn't sure would fly, because it's bits and pieces, it's a mood really and a fantasy. It came about because I was on tour and I was in Liverpool and I was lying on the bed of the hotel we were staying in. And I was trying to take a nap and there was this enormous clamoring going on across the street. We were staying across the street from a cathedral. I started to think about one of my first boyfriends, who was from Liverpool. That started to put me in the mood of the books like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," and things that had to do with bells, and the ringing of bells. I was thinking about old loves, so there was this sort of nostalgic feeling to the whole afternoon. So I took the moments that made sense and put them altogether in the song."
The Performing Songwriter Magazine Interview, by Bill DeMain (http://www.vega.net/perfsong.htm)

The diary pages on which the song is inspired:
"The bells are clanging and clamouring from what appears to be a church. Now they have stopped, rung twice -- now the ceremony is over. It had gone on for a good five or ten minutes. Two clocks look into my hotel room and from the window I see a small river. Is this the river Mersey that Andy once told me about? I thought of him today as the bus rolled into town, how homesick he was for Liverpool, for the big clock that always told the same time. Where is it? For the river Mersey which, if this is it, is much smaller and browner than the Hudson which I am homesick for right now. The light is pale and thin here like the inhabitants of this country. A pale watery light, not unpleasant but not substantial. Here the bells have started again, it begins at the top of the scale and hurls itself down in a mad clamor over and over again in an uneven rhythm. There must be some mad boy in the belfry hurling himself across the ropes like a hunchback. Perhaps he loves someone who doesn't love him. Perhaps he is remembering an old lost love. Now the scale is confused and is sounds like a carnival of bells, a dull peculiar melody, with a lilt but no reason to it.
Now it returns to the scale from the beginning over and over from the top down to the bottom, the low notes hitting with a dark clanging resonance, the top bells more cheerful. Besides this banging and clamouring there is no other sound, no shouts, traffic, people. Nothing except the stone, the pale sunlight, the small brown river and the bells on Sunday afternoon.
This morning I lay awake from four am to 730 am. a long treacherous
stretch of time to think things over again. Unfortunately lately I fall into
idle daydreams about his brown skin, open generosity, blunt…"
"The Open Hand Book - Notes on her New Album", Musician, 1991, also published in Language and in the Limited Edition of 99.9F° (http://www.vega.net/handbook.htm) transcribed by Eric Szczerbinski

About the Hunchback:
"No, it was not a reference to my boyfriend. The thing is, the day that I was in Liverpool there was a Sunday where I was sitting in Liverpool and I was in the hotel that's across the street from the Cathedral, and the bells were ringing and ringing and ringing, and they rang for about an hour. And I guess that started me thinking of who might be ringing the bells. And so I started to imagine that it was some kind of...if not a hunchback exactly, he was some kind of crazy lovesick boy who was amusing himself by flinging himself across the bells in the tower. He's NOT committing suicide, by the way, he is only ringing a bell....and then the monk, I guess, is supposed to be my old boyfriend. So, if you see the video that's me twirling and dancing around with the tambourine and the curly hair. That's in fact me as the gypsy."
In Session on the Nicky Campbell Show, Summer, 1992 Suzanne Vega - in Session on the Nicky Campbell Show, BBC Radio 1, c. August 1992 [The transcript starts just into the interview] http://www.suzannevega.com/about/1992/nickycampbell.htm