Monday, April 07, 2014

My Music Monday

I've always been a fan of Suzanne Vega, all the way back to her debut in 1985.  Though to be fair, I probably backtracked that debut after hearing "Left of Center" to the Pretty in Pink soundtrack from the following year.

Yikes 29 years. Or 28.

At one point, I even liked "Luka" and "Tom's Diner", until I couldn't stand them anymore. Radio overkill is a terrible thing. And there were way better songs on that second album anyways besides those.

Vega, in my opinion, had a few disappointments - Day of Open Hand had one semi-memorable song and her first disk produced by her then husband, Mitchell Froom (99F Degrees), though their follow-up, Nine Objects of Desire, is without a doubt her best album.

The thing about Vega is, while her musical styles somewhat changed, she kept coming back to more of that folk scene for which she's known. It was just her two Froom produced disks that had her stray a bit - to mixed results. And her voice has remained the same and intact, which for a 30+ years of singing is no small feat.

In the last few years, she's been rerecording some of her old music and releasing it on her own label, as any artist in the 80s or after got a huge raw deal from the record companies. The artists don't own their recordings and make little to no money on them - some even owning tons of money to cover the advances for recording and marketing their albums.

Vega is out with a new disk this year - her first of new material in seven years - Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles.

A review waits, possibly for later. But I am taken by a song from that disk, "I Never Wear White".

While the recorded version is fine and has a fuller sound, I am more fond of just the acoustic version. That is always Vega's strong suit anyways. Her touring band (ok, at least when I saw her in '87) was very small and mostly acoustic anyways.

So here you go......


1 comment:

Jim said...

I liked it!