1987Released
3:51

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about Luka. By Songfacts®.

This song is about child abuse. It tells the story of a frightened boy who is forbidden to talk about what he's going through.

On a 1987 Swedish television special, Vega said: "A few years ago, I used to see this group of children playing in front of my building, and there was one of them, whose name was Luka, who seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children. I always remembered his name, and I always remembered his face, and I didn't know much about him, but he just seemed set apart from these other children that I would see playing. And his character is what I based the song 'Luka' on. In the song, the boy Luka is an abused child - In real life I don't think he was. I think he was just different."

Speaking with SongTalk magazine, Vega explained that she started with the title for this song. Describing how she wrote it, she said: "It takes months of kind of fingering it in my mind, while I'm walking around or doing something else, it's just like a problem that my mind goes back to. It wiggles. It's like you're trying to get the right angle, and once the angle comes, I can write the song in two hours. Like 'Luka' took two hours. It took months of thinking about it and lining up the shot, in a sense. Like if you're playing pool and you want to clear the table, you line it all up, and then you just hit it and everything clears. It's very satisfying, but it takes months of preparation. I wasn't sure what the character would say. I knew what the character's problem was, but I didn't know how to get the listener involved. I wanted it to be from the point of view of a person who is abused. Now the problem that that person has is that they can't say it. So how do you get the problem out if you can't say it? How do you involve the listener? Well, you introduce yourself: 'My name is Luka.' And 'I live on the second floor, I live upstairs from you,' and so therefore you're engaging the listener. 'I think you've seen me before,' so you start to listen. You're drawing the listener into this world with very simple, basic information. And it then proceeds to state the problem without ever saying what the problem is. That was my problem as a songwriter: How do I give this information without ever giving it? It's easy to point a finger. It's easy to say, 'Child abuse must stop' and everybody knows this."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of Luka.
F♯Key
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
125BPM

Album

The album Luka is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released Luka.
A&M
© 1987 A&M Records Inc.
℗ 1987 UMG Recordings, Inc.

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73.6MSongs
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