Suzanne Vega, Songs In Red And Gray

First of all let me start my review by saying that in the last month or so I’ve fallen in love with Thomas Hardy and the late nineteenth century in general, so it was with great pleasure that I discovered the new Suzanne Vega record contained all sorts of references to heathered moors and grey pewter vases with deep red roses in them. “Songs In Red And Gray”, Ms. V’s first album in five years (eek!) and her first since her break (musical and personal) with producer Mitchell Froom, has a lot to offer, although I think a lot of people might not notice it.

It’s an unassuming sort of album, the kind you can put on while you’re, say, making the bed or ironing. It’s an album about divorce and other sorts of bad things, but Suzanne Vega isn’t, for example, Cat Power, and so you don’t have to worry too much about having a nervous breakdown of your own every time you pop the CD in. It’s more of a sort of ‘Here I am. I’m just saying, you know’ kind of thing than a ‘Woe is me and Jesus help you that I don’t shoot you down in the hollerin’ pines’ thing.

That said, in addition to being on a Thomas Hardy kick, I’ve also been on a devil-music kick lately. Not that devil-music is actually a genre, I just notice that a lot of the music I’ve been into lately involve the devil and Jesus and drinking and murder and things like that.

So maybe, I said to myself, just maybe I’m moving out of my Suzanne Vega stage. I mean, after all, I started listening to her in 1996, when I also listened to a lot of Cassandra Wilson, the cranberries, and “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo. And, while I still think Cassandra Wilson and the cranberries and “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo are just swell, I hardly ever listen to any of them anymore.

But after a few listens, I changed my mind. She’s still got it, whatever it is that some people have got. The album is at least as good as most of her stuff, and while it’s no Nine Objects of Desire (which is one of the best records ever made, according to lil’ ol’ me), it has a lot going for it.

Last year, when I was at a certain boring college in East Jipeepee, New York, and spent all my time sitting at my computer abusing Napster, I heard two early live versions of songs on the album. “Widows’ Walk” sounded like something somebody would sing in a bar by the ocean, and the spare acoustic arrangement and the sound quality of the live performance made it sound even better. “Harbor Song,” another nautical-themed number, was even better. At the time I decided that it was one of my very favourite Suzanne Vega recordings, right up there with “Left of Center” and “Small Blue Thing” and “Blood Makes Noise”. And it still is. But those two early hints sort of led me to imagine the album as something other than what it is. I was picturing the kind of thing you’d want to listen to on a foggy day in New Bedford, the kind of day where people wear black raincoats and huddle awkwardly in restaurants so they don’t have to face loneliness. Instead, “Songs In Red And Gray” is what I’d want to hear on a ride to somebody’s house for Sunday dinner.

Penitent, the album’s opener, is a nice song, although it’s not as dramatic as, say, Birth-day or even earlier songs like Freeze Tag. I think Rupert Hine’s production doesn’t take anything away from the songs, but it doesn’t add a lot to them, either. Lyrically and melodically, Penitent isn’t that far removed from, say, Casual Match (from Nine Objects of Desire) But instead of Mitchell Froom’s inventive weirdness we have Rupert Hine’s standard sort of pop record.

What’s interesting about this standard sort of pop record, of course, is that nobody actually makes records like that anymore. You won’t turn on the radio and hear much that sounds like “Widows Walk,” the album’s first American single. Maybe twenty years ago you might have, but it’s questionable. The only comparison I can think of for some reason is the Carpenters, but of course that’s not right either. The song has been turned from something very personal and haunting into something strangely beautiful. There’s something about exposing the rhyme concealed in the beginning of “the very area where I did see the thing go down” that makes the song work for me, and the way the chorus begins sounds to me like a burst of joy rather than a song about a marriage wrecking.

It reminds me of Shawn Colvin’s A Few Small Repairs, which was about the dissolution of her own marriage. Rather than write something totally depressing, Colvin’s album ended with hopeful tracks like “New Thing Now” and “Nothin On Me,” and the angriest number, “Sunny Came Home”, was poppy enough that it ended up being her only big hit.

My favourite song on the album is “It Makes Me Wonder,” an interesting exploration of contradictions that extends Vega’s career-spanning trend of becoming increasingly willing to sing about internal issues. Her earliest songs, like “Tom’s Diner,” which was written about seven hundred and fifty years ago now, tended to be about people who were simultaneously outside themselves and separated from the world they lived in; in “It Makes Me Wonder” she’s in the middle of having sex.

Another highlight is “Last Year’s Troubles,” which is about romanticizing the past. Recently at work somebody who’s only a few years older than I am said that she couldn’t imagine being in school now that so many kids bring guns to school. I pointed out that when I was in school people were worried about guns, too, but she wouldn’t believe me. And that’s what “Last Year’s Troubles” means to me. I could go on and on, of course, and probably will, but I’ll stop writing now for the sake of not boring you all into comas (like I did with that Tori Amos review.... if you’ve recovered consciousness yet, sorry!)