Suzanne Vega
Retrospective: The Best of Suzanne Vega

THE REVIEW

“Nighthawks”, The painting by Edward Hopper, from 1942, inspired by a Greenwich Village locale, with a cheap cigarette brand on the sign, between sharp lines and volumes marked by vivid light, offers a view of a deserted street and some isolated figures inside the diner: a man with his back turned, a bent waiter, a couple reminiscent of Lauren Bacall (wonderful!) and Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep.” The observer is cut off from the scene.

There is certainly no lack of “narrative paintings” in Suzanne Vega's songs, the contrast between interior and exterior, solitude, even within a couple, the daily portraits of people and things, passersby, soldiers, nereids, gypsies, twilights.

The dim light that attracts and drags through weak shades. Simple, fragile words that stumble and ensnare; you cannot help but follow them, longing to catch them.

Her almost unreal delicacy is impetuous.

“Solitude Standing”, in 1987, was my first and immediate approach to singer-songwriter music, I was 14 years old. A lightning strike with verses like:

“There's a woman
On the outside
Looking inside
Does she see me?

No she does not
Really see me
Cause she sees
Her own reflection”

(from “Tom’s_Diner).

Of course, she does not cut the observer off from her music, but gradually draws them in, gracefully. A sensation that remains over the years.

The songwriter, whose Folk style inevitably owes a debt to Joni Mitchell, can be compared to Dory Previn, and, as a kindred spirit, to Laura Nyro, takes Leonard Cohen much more as a narrative model than Dylan.

In the mid-80s, the ever-prominent acoustic guitar was also out of fashion, a hapax, not to mention her exacerbated introspection, or that gentle, whispered, not at all virtuosic, at most measured singing. Yet, almost inexplicably, she enjoyed a certain commercial success, so much so that she ended up paving the way for much of the female scene of the 90s. She elevated fragility to an aesthetic category.

Suzanne Vega was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1959, and at two years old, she went to live in New York, in the Spanish Harlem neighborhood, with her mother and adoptive father, Ed Vega, a Puerto Rican writer, who steered her toward literary studies. Setting aside her passion for ballet, she grew artistically in Greenwich venues. Slender and phlegmatic, bohemian with innocence, she immediately seemed like a champion of the ghetto, sincere and believable.

The debut album (“Suzanne Vega”, 1985) and the subsequent “Solitude Standing”, the albums to own, which best represent her, are wisely produced by Lenny Kaye, guitarist for Patti Smith and compiler of the “Nuggets”. Here, instead, we have “Retrospective: The Best of”, A&M 2003, epitomizing a career marked by a cultured and modern folk, which has always maintained a certain poetic aura in the lyrics and a fundamental stylistic coherence, even through disorienting changes. Indeed, since 1992, with the producer Mitchel Froom, soon to be her husband, she will experiment with electro-acoustic blends of urban modernity, venturing into “techno” arrangements, between synths and drum machines, but, fortunately, also aligning significant guests like Richard Thompson and David Hidalgo (Los Lobos). Demonstrating courage, at the very least. “Nine Objects of Desire”, from 1996, pushes that language towards lo-fi. The next step, “Songs of Gray and Red”, marks a return to more conventional Folk.

The collection in question, broader and more exhaustive than the previous best “Tried and True”, but with all the artistic limitations of the case, contains various pearls, presenting them heterogeneously in review. The first to be remembered is “Left Of Center”, brilliant collaboration with Joe Jackson, a flower accidentally fallen into the New Wave and the soundtrack of the film “Pretty in Pink”. It is not found in any studio album. From the debut, they shine, in their unbearable slenderness and beauty, “Cracking”, “Small Blue Thing”, “The Queen and The Soldier (Live, Nyon 1991)” and “Marlene On the Wall”:

“Even if I am in love with you
All this to say, what's it to you?
Observe the blood, the rose tattoo
Of the fingerprints on me from you

Other evidence has shown
That you and I are still alone
We skirt around the danger zone
And don't talk about it later

Marlene watches from the wall
Her mocking smile says it all
As the records the rise and fall
Of every soldier passing

But the only soldier now is me
I'm fighting things I cannot see
I think it's called my destiny
That I am changing

Marlene on the wall”.

The poster of Marlene Dietrich, the blue angel, watches with derision the love of a couple that is the unresolved sum of two solitudes.

From “Solitude Standing”, the album where Vega appeared behind frosted glass, the autobiographical “Luka”, meaning “light”, an emblematic name to talk about child abuse, the most horrible crime in the world. Then the distances shrink to the quiet in “Gypsy” (“We strangers know each other now / As part of the whole design”) and in the ethereal “Calypso”:

“My name is Calypso
And I have lived alone
I live on an island
And I waken to the dawn
A long time ago
I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning
And I brought him into me
Now today
Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night

I let him go”.

These tracks seem like elegies to the rain, songs about dripping vapors along chilled glass.

The ballad “Tired of Sleeping” is another jolt. The usual domestic arrangement here is enriched by the organ:

“Oh Mom, the old man is telling me something
His eyes are wide and his mouth is thin
And I just can't hear what he's saying

Oh Mom, I wonder when I'll be waking
It's just that there's so much to do
And I'm tired of sleeping”.

There is space for the popular Acid Jazz version by D.N.A. of “Tom’s Diner”: initially “unauthorized” it was adopted by her, making the club audience dance to unusual and “aulic” verses. It is taken from the much more enchanting a cappella track that concluded the second LP, included in turn in the bonus CD of the English version of this retrospective, alongside five live tracks and “Anniversary”, the only new track.

Then the collection is bolstered with the so-called “experimental” songs on which “Woman on the Tier” stands out, with its cacophonic percussive elements, reminiscent of Tom Waits from “Bone Machine”. The tinkling piano of the verses of “In Liverpool” has set a standard and, in the refrain, gives way to an imperious and compelling tongue twister. “(I’ll Never Be) Your Maggie May” marks at best the return to classical Folk with a titillating melody.

In short, a tribute to the career of a secluded but important artist in the American singer-songwriter realm, who recently published “Lover, Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers”, her ninth studio album, dedicated to the American writer, who closely resembled her.

Suzanne Vega is somewhat the courage within weakness. A creator of diaphanous, transparent, clean songs. Of beauty that, in the best moments, has only linearity and subtle nuances. Elsewhere vainly hidden.