Suzanne explaining where the ide of "Pilgrimage" comes from:
"Pilgrimage" comes from an incense bowl. I've been a Buddhist since I was 16 - the Nichiren Shoshu sect. So every morning I chant and burn incense. It's that linear thing of time as a line that's burning. Sometimes I watch the incense burn, and I imagine that it's this great journey from one end of this big, dusty bowl to the other. The song starts off with the one line of incense that turns into the life that turns into the land, and I felt happy with the idea of expansion. I'm saying, "I'm coming to you/I'll be there in time' to death as well as to the source. But there's a feeling of, when I die, it will be okay, because I will have done what I mean to do. I won't have missed it."
"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

On the meeting with her biological father:
"Regarding "Pilgrimage" -- yes, it was about the incense bowl, as it said the quoted interview, but it was also about the journey to find my father, who I met in 1988. He lives in California, and I lived in New York, so I took a plane trip across the country to see him for the first time since I was 18 months old. So "years of an inch and a step toward a source" means my source -- my father. It's a song with at least two meanings."
From the mailing list Undertow (http://www.suzannevega.com/undertow)

Notice the references in the song to language and pipelines just like in "Rusted Pipe". [Ed.]