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Dates Appearing: July 5 - 10 Current Release: Nine Objects of Desire |
Songs of love and danger, glamour, dreams and longing. NINE OBJECTS OF DESIRE is Suzanne Vega's extraordinary new achievement. "I like to write about those moments when you're flying - you've lost one trapeze and you're about to get the other," Vega says, "You're suspended in mid-air. It's exciting." That tender suspense, that state of risk and expectation, underlies this bold new music. Emotionally satisfying and complex, stylistically diverse, the album confirms Suzanne's standing as one of today's most distinctive voices - storyteller, seer, provocateur. "I like to present audiences with different facets of life..." she says, "sometimes ones they don't want to hear, sometimes ones they haven't seen before, sometimes ones they recognize without having thought of before. I have a sense that I'm provoking their lives."
Recorded over a year's time in New York with such ace players as Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas (drummer and bassist of The Attractions), guitarist Steve Donnelly (Tasmin Archer), drummer/percussionist Jerry Marotta (Peter Gabriel), and Soul Coughing members Yuval Gabay and Sebastian Steinberg on "Tombstone", NINE OBJECTS OF DESIRE is a rhythmic wonder, surging from bossa nova insinuation to mid-tempo ease, from hip-hop assertiveness to jazzy swing. With Vega's husband, Mitchell Froom, handling keyboards and producing, the melodies, either streetwise or echoing a classical grace, acknowledge Suzanne's folk heritage and yet build on the audacity of her last album, 1992's techno-leaning, 99.9F°.
Thematically, the record explores nine different types of desire, such as maternal desire ("Birth-day," "World Before Columbus"), nostalgic remembrance ("Headshots"), forbidden longing ("Caramel"), and erotic friendship ("Stockings"). It ranges from "Honeymoon Suite" ("A funny song about our honeymoon in Paris, portrayed almost exactly as it happened") to the mordant "Thin Man" ("The thin man is Death - it's a paraphrase of a Jacques Brel song"). "The whole area of sensuality," Vega says, "was one I didn't want to write about, as a woman, for a long time. This is more sensual than some of the records I've done - my early music was more astringent. I had to let go of the censoring voice in my mind - after I did, the songs felt very natural to me."
Exploring the intricacies of heart and spirit has been Vega's life work. Hailed by The New York Times for her 1985 debut, SUZANNE VEGA, as "the strongest, most decisively shaped songwriting personality to come along in years," she began, still in her teens, singing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Born in Los Angeles, she was raised in New York's Spanish Harlem and Upper West Side. Her stepfather a Puerto Rican writer, Suzanne grew up in an intensely multi-cultural milieu. "My baby-sitters listened to Motown, my parents were into '60s cool jazz and bossa nova - Astrud Gilberto probably remains my biggest singing influence. Of course, I loved the Beatles, and folk performers like Pete Seeger. Later, I got into Santana, War, the music to 'Shaft'." After studying dance at the High School of Performing Arts, she enrolled as a literature major at Barnard College, supported herself as a receptionist and played The Bottom Line and Folk City at night.
Co-produced by Steve Addabbo and Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, SUZANNE VEGA and such sharply-etched songs as "Marlene on the Wall" and "SmaII Blue Thing" garnered instant critical acclaim. SOLITUDE STANDING (1987) with the haunting "Luka" (U.K. #1, U.S. #11) established Vega, according to England's Sounds as "the great songstress of the '80s..no one is really doing anything like this." DAYS OF OPEN HAND (1990), earning a 4-star review, found Rolling Stone proclaiming: "She's now beyond borders, making an unaffected art music that's heady, heartfelt, very demanding...and very rewarding." 99.9F°" ventured into new territory, with its daring fusion of acoustic and industrial textures; again, it signalled the progress of an artist who consistently blazes trails. In a lead review, Entertainment Weekly awarded 99.9F° an "A" stating, "If there isn't yet such a rubric as 'industrial folk,' then Vega and her new producer, Mitchell Froom, have just invented it."
Along the way, there were side projects, special events - collaborations with Philip Glass, Joe Jackson, Arthur Baker, They Might Be Giants, The Lemonheads; contributions to the Disney compilation, Stay Awake, to the Grateful Dead tribute Deadicated, to Pavarotti & Friends, to the Leonard Cohen tribute, Tower of Song, and to the soundtracks for Dead Man Walking and The Truth About Cats and Dogs. A funky mix by DNA of Vega's "Tom's Diner" scored a massive hit and exposed her music to an even broader audience, even sparking a whole album of unsolicited covers called Tom's Album. Here was a songwriter so universal in her reach that fans of folk and hip-hop alike could embrace her.
NINE OBJECTS OF DESIRE continues the advance. As always, Vega's lyrics are astute couplets - "Casual match in a very dry field/What could be the season's yield?" ("Casual Match"), "So, goodbye, sweet appetite/No single bite could satisfy" ("Caramel') - alternate with intimations of deeper wisdom: "I don't need to see the gates of famous men/But I do try to see the Kingdom every now and then/lf you ask me where it is, it's on a humble map/And I know that to enter in the doorway, show your handicap" ("Tombstone"). From the percussive intensity of "Birth-day." with its cunning organ, to the multifarious, alluring arrangement on the elegant "Mv Favorite Plum," the music sets up Vega's singing in high relief - and she's never sung better. "When my daughter, Ruby, was born, my body changed and it affected my voice. I certainly notice a difference." Languid or confiding, inventive in its phrasing, Suzanne's singing works heart-to-heart on the listener - "I feel I have to tell the truth, take a stand, reveal what I know, what I've experienced."
NINE OBJECTS OF DESIRE - a collection of stories, of tone poems - is a subtle, masterwork album that, for listeners, repays the close scrutiny Vega herself brings to matters of the heart. In "Lolita," a song Suzanne describes as "perhaps the simplest, most straightforward I've ever written," she sings: "Hey girl, I've been where you are standing/leaning in the doorway in your mother's black dress/So hungry for the one understanding/Looking for a token of blood or tenderness." Blood and tenderness, birth and death, the full scope of human experience - that's the message and beauty of NINE OBJECTS OF DESIRE.
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