The wait was worth it for an almost faultless set of songs for our time.
It’s 11 years since Suzanne Vega last produced an album of all new material. Having always been a particularly thoughtful songwriter she has produced a set of songs that reflect her view of the world as she finds it. ‘Speakers Corner’ opens with an almost Roxy Music guitar lick and closing solo from Gerry Leonard, who also produced the album. “People should be accountable for what they say. They can’t just lie. One would think that that would be self-evident,” she says of the subject matter.
She follows this with ‘Flying With Angels’, a minor key tune reminiscent of her earlier work, and ‘Witch’, where a catastrophe in a man’s life is narrated by his wife and credited to her husband, poet Paul Mills. “What witch sent this glitch into the brain? A cranial surprise. Struck down his stuttering frown, she’s hitting him twice as he tries again to rise.”
The Dylan styled ‘Chambermaid’ imagines “what the character of the Chambermaid from Bob Dylan’s song ‘I Want You’ would say about her own aspirations and her relationship with the great man himself”. That is followed by ‘Love Thief’, which she describes as her version of a 70s Motown song. Full of smooth harmonies, strings, and a funky backbeat, the words seem to have a double meaning, looking at the ideology of love in a personal way but maybe also the sort of blind worship that politicians and “influencers” seek. “I am the love thief, And I’m coming for you… I mean your heart And your conscience too. To these things be true. Tell me, how can you lose?”
We now find ourselves in the heart of the album, with an “admiring look” at ‘Lucinda.’ “She’s a Dusty Springfield Of the south Leatherette pants and a pale pink mouth… Cowboy slouch stage star amble, I love her ‘cause she’s blunt and humble.” The electric piano and fuzz guitar have that same toughness she appreciates in Williams. ‘Last Train from Mariupol’ inspired by a New York Times article “saying there were whispers that God himself was frightened by what he was seeing.” Affecting and simple, this should be played to the various world leaders playing politics with what is, in truth, a humanitarian tragedy.
She closes the album with two typically Vega observational songs. “I grew up in the poorest neighbourhoods of Manhattan, and rats were always a problem. All the stories in the song are true, most told to me firsthand,” she says of ‘Rats’ a tune which would fit right into the Stranglers’ first album, both lyrically and musically. ‘Galway’ is a little true story of the one that might have been, with Galway, Ireland as a mysterious land of romance and possibility that we never quite access, folky and Celtic is acts as a sunny coda to the harsher messages of much of the album. The punch line will raise a smile as the ideal close to one of the most perfect lyrics you will hear this year.
If you haven’t caught up with Vega in recent years, this album may come as a surprise if you are expecting the folk of ‘Luka’ or ‘Marlene on the Wall.’ She has matured as a musician and a writer, becoming both more pointed in her observations and offering a wider musical palette. As the length of time between her albums seems to be lengthening, hopefully, she will find something to say again soon as the world is a better place for a new Suzanne Vega album.
