Suzanne Vega: Classic or Drip?

Fringes OK 4 Joey.

E

I will not say she "rockified" her sound much. More like she "popified" it, leaving behind the accoustic sound of her early albums.

Mitchell Froom is one of my favourite producers ever and I think he did an excellent job with those 90s Vega albums, like he also did with Crowded House, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney.

allow me to be pedantic: "Ironbound" is actually about Newark NJ. Which makes it even more melancholy, if you ask me.

While her latest album is a dud (I 100% blame Rupert Hine's busy production) everything else she's done is wonderful. Solitude Standing is packed with strong songwriting ... her more electronic album 99.9 F strikes that perfect balance between digital and analog, she uses her rather limited vocal range extremely well.

"Left Of Center" is unquestionably classic though, and her Dead and Cohen covers are really worth a search.

That first s/t album is probably my ultimate winter album esp. 'Cracking'

So I have just found out, 4 months late, that SV has released a new album. AMG calls it "without reservation, the defining creative moment of Suzanne Vega's career thus far".

So how ome no-one is talking about it?

99.9F is definitely classic. Her Mitchell Froom produced material is very underrated. Great singer-songwriter stuff before that too.

the new one is really beautiful! it all works, esp. "ludlow street" and "anniversary", the latter of which may be one of her best songs. highly recommended.

i keep forgetting to pick up tickets for her show here in november

luka is cool.

wow! this is exciting. i'll have to get it.

def classic (99.9 rocks)

omgosh she just emailed me and i'm being an idiot. u know, i feel like all nervous now. well she emailed me bcuz of work. but now i'm all MAYBE I CAN BE HER FRIEND or MAYBE SHE SHOULD LISTEN TO MY SONGS which is just wrong bcuz i mean how often does she get that really? i don't know. frazzled.

I guess that depends on what you do for work.

I really enjoy the deadpan commentaries she provided for the Retrospective DVD. Like how on "Left Of Center" she thinks they were trying to make her look like Molly Ringwald.

That must have been nice for her.

It would be lovely to hear from her; thus I envy you, Surmounter.

still frazzled =P

ooh she just called ME!!!!!!! she's nice, and her speaking voice is really pretty.

grrrr

My name is Suzanne, I blog for the NYT:

You should know that I am usually wary of sharing ideas in progress. I go over and over the lyrics until they feel just right to me, and this can be a very irritating process. I am also a little superstitious — if you talk too much or reveal too much, the spell could fall flat and the song won’t work. However, I have also shared songs, gone back and redone them, had them turn out much better and then forgotten about the earlier drafts. So it happens all different ways.

But listen, readers, don’t steal my ideas, please. I will track you down.

So far, the titles for new songs run like this: “Daddy Is White,” about race in America today; “Avatar,” about aging and spirituality; “Profanity,” about why profanity is good; “Back Alley View,” basically a summary of our last tour; “Pale Cowboy,” about a songwriter I don’t know very well.

I just bought her first LP on CD - something like 22 years after it first became a fixture in my musical upbringing, that era of fewer records played over and over.

I think I like 'Cracking' more than anything else.

ok well im super drunk right now after playing bass in an awesome metal show and i have a hot chick waiting for me in my bed so ill say this:

fuck tom and his nu style of banning whatever he wants whenever he wants (sans admin log)

hey.. if i was a dude in his 30's, post failed marriage from an ilx chick, in a dead end job that never got laid, and had barely any irl friends i would love anonymously modding ilx too...

basically: this is the only thing dude has control of in his life.

even when he gets drunk he spends his time modding ilx. kinda sad.
fine.

you can say 6000 registered ilxors were good today but one of them that was actually totally cool, brought the lols and was a solid dude got banned for no reason was enough for me to say "fuck this shit"

tom millar obviously loves the "this is the thread where i say"
style of pussy ass bullshit posts that make ilx terrible. just see idiot thread board for that bullshit. its basically the same 4 ilxors talking about their bullshit lives that no one asked about plus tom telling us how wasted he is.

its like an episode of sex in the city with tom and ned adding in there 2 cents once in a while. wow what bunch of lols.

im not one to make a big post about leaving but fuck this shit. for reals. im leaving for gershy who is a real bro and "GOD FORBID!!!!" bumped threads that already existed....

this board is now just a bunch of rich college kids and dumb fat bitches (lets get real.... even the actual rock stars that post here are academic morons.) that wanna talk about the politics of messenger bags and facebook profiles. obviously tom wanted this. you can tell by his "dudes im totally wasted!" posts all over the dumb ass molify lingbert thread. so hay! you got what you wanted, tom!

i hope your life of never getting laid by anyone other than ally and being stuck in a dead end job is finally giving you what you wanted in life. everyone hates you btw. but hey as long as you rule who gives a fuck right?

I am touched that you have chosen the Suzanne Vega thread to voice these thoughts.

He's posting this in EVERY THREAD

I'm still not 100% sure I need to have this (1st) album.

maybe I could trade it in

for Bruce Springsteen

i love her

This is one of my favorite anectdotes:

I was working backstage at a club last year where Suzanne Vega was the 7:30 and TMBG were the 9:30, both doing record release shows. Vega knew Flansburgh from around the music scene and they struck up a conversation. John asks, "What's your new record about?" and she says "Oh, it's a personal thing about my reactions to September 11th in New York, how the city responded and changed and grew."

"Wow," says Flansburgh, "Ours is about giant robots."

i love her even more

I love that her openness to DNA's remix of "Tom's Diner" (when the record co. simply wanted to do a cease and desist) led to her hearing all of the following:

Other versions came flooding in from all over the world. People made them up and mailed me cassettes. I loved one by Michigan & Smiley, a kind of reggae improvisation. And Nikki D, a young black woman from Los Angeles with a gold tooth, changed it into a song about teenage pregnancy — that was another one of my favorites.

that vega blog is really interesting!

It is. I love this woman

The real one isn’t cute, and isn’t atmospheric. It’s just plain, which is why I liked it.

Ha: I wrote a short piece for someone a while ago about precisely this -- how Tom's Restaurant is one of very few "plain" places in Manhattan, and how it's become weirdly well-known via two pop-culture things that are actually all about how plain it is.

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/4357.jpg

<3 <3 <3 <3

No quite as cleverly penned as her NY Times post but still worth checking out---

http://web.mac.com/suzannevega/iWeb/SuzanneVega.com/Blog/4DC657FC-568B-4B6F-8F86-C14058D16D06.html

i am loving 'rosemary' and 'world before columbus' today - the arrangements & her voice are so warm.

Her debut and that specific sound is still one of my favorite things ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom's_Diner

i had no idea about the story of this song

I realized how much I like that 99.9 album.

New acoustic re-recordings are actually rather good. Her voice sounds wonderful.

http://www.suzannevega.com/store/

Suzanne Vega was my first lesbian crush. Can't quite pin what I liked her in the first place, something sincere and genuine about the way she writes and sings her songs. Came to know her from Tom's Diner but stayed for Caramel and Liverpool.

that made no sense.

New acoustic re-recordings are actually rather good. Her voice sounds wonderful

Might have to pick that up, I was totally in love with those songs at the time. Although it's kind of depressing when an artist feels the need to reheat old stuff in this way.

yeah, I'm tempted to pick this up but listening to the clips, I realize that all my favorites (ie. from the 2 first lps) were already accoustic to begin with.

nah moka that made perfect sense!

i mostly play s.vega when i'm hungover these days, her voice has an incredibly comforting feel to it.

It's heartening to see love for SV. I dug out and listened to her first couple of records for the first time in a few years and realised I'd slept on them, Solitude Standing especially. Fear of that mid/late 80s production put me off from revisiting, but they still stand up pretty well, some of it still sounds maybe a bit 80's NY session guy.

Because of this I checked out the recent volumes of reworked songs (I wonder if she's going to do the whole lot eventually) some of the arrangements are kinda curious but in the main they sound pretty great.

Cosign wholeheartedly on previous comments about the wintry qualities of those two records, Ironbound/Fancy Poultry was the ideal soundrack to a sunny but freezing Xmas shopping sortie.

First album was one of my main school-bus-cassette-walkman tapes.

She does really nice harmonies on this song "Handsome Molly" by New England folk guy Bill Morrissey. This is the song, but the original with her on it isn't on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uooCDIYeOSA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YIBmZjONtA

Funny how Ringwald-ized she looks in this.

and hot!

suzanna vega - "left of center"
replacements - "left of the dial"

what else were musicians left of in the mid-'80s?

Reagan.

she's writing a play about carson mccullers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z20AyVto81E

Spotted that Serj Tankian's new single is called Left Of Centre, not a cover sadly.

shes hot

in the "goods off the back of a wagon" sense?

hot in face and hot in voice - doublehot

99.9F and Nine Objects of Desire are still both pretty great records, aren't they? The former is like Laurie Anderson as a folk singer.

two of her weakest imo

An intriguing opinion!

i like the early stuff, the first two LPs are unfuckwithable

first new studio album in seven years: Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles

nice title?

Forever sitting with her knees bunched up by the window in some Soho loftspace staring out at a pale, wintry afternoon.

all hail the mother of the mp3

What if I like Susanne Vega and the new albums by Beck and Neil Finn. Does Metamucil have a subscription service?

this is not what I expected her to sound like in 2014 - I like it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq7CLAkRquc

hmmm does it work now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq7CLAkRquc

She's classic even just for Tom's Diner. The DNA remix is always good for hang outs

there's some godawful modern alternative rock song that samples the DNA remix of this and her voice and when it comes on the radio I'm always duped momentarily and then it starts in with its awful racket and I get mad

Solitude Standing still holds up, IMO. Great record.

I didn't know until doing research for an obit that Demme directed the video for the title track.

Drippy Indie pretenders these ladies. "...female singer-songwriters with fringes." Suzanne Vega? Your jokeing right? How about some voices with a little intensity to them, i.e. Veda Hilla, Marianne Nowottny, or Fursaxa. Please, get with it Ben! No wonder you can't laid, You dork you :)
― Eve, Saturday, March 9, 2002 8:00 PM

Ironbound/Fancy Poultry absolute classic, especially the long instrumental tail

oh yes. that was the first glimpse of what music could really be as a 10 year old in 1987

Listened to the first album last winter for the first time in years. "Cracking" is still so great.

Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles

Hearing this for the first time tonight, "Portrait of the Knight of Wands" came up in a mix and is pretty compelling:

https://youtu.be/UJofPsA6duY