I fucking adore Suzanne Vega. And who the hell doesn’t? [You know her as the loop-track voice behind “Tom’s Diner” (oh, just Google it), which is a crying shame, given her nothing-short-of-intimidating back-catalog. First I heard of her was “The Queen & the Solider” (fair warning: it will ruin you), which I encountered as a goddamn camp song -- holy hell did those lyrics keep me up at night.] She’s an utterly captivating, soulful, poetic and prolific and raw storyteller of a “folk” artist who writes better lyrics than I write prose. If Rox says Ani DiFranco is this generation’s Dylan, Suzanne Vega is our Joni Mitchell. Here are honest and penetrating songs about being, well, Virginia Woolf’s kinda woman: introspective, intelligent, a voracious luster, a pragmatic and jaded lover, independent and hard and secretly vulnerable, endlessly empathetic and impossibly confident. Her lyrics are cryptic, metaphoric, sensual, evocative. I swear she has a voice “made of china, made of glass”. These are the sorts of songs that you’ll find yourself crying over without really knowing why.

Note: These are all stripped-down mostly-acoustic crystal-clear retreads of songs Suzanne Vega has released over the years. The first of four “solo acoustic” records Vega plans to put out as a career retrospective. These are compliments to the originals, not replacements. You can’t go wrong with any of these.

try: 4, 1, 8
no FCCs

*1. slowish and sad. contemplative, depressing, beautiful. positively sword-singing (harmonics!) highbeam guitar over fingerpicked acoustic. fragile, china doll vocals. somehow more staccato and separated than the original recording.
2. descending blues line and bossa nova shaker beat. finger-snaps! subdued, sly island heat. super groovy and sexy song about lusting after a lost cause.
3. midtempo beamy echoey electric guitar. doubled-note riff. spoken-word, breathy slinkster/coy vocals. this is where poe (uh, the singer) gets it from.
*4. a clear/bright fingerpicked masterpiece. fucking gorgeous song, period. it’s always sounded like christmas and woodburning and cats napping on your chest to me. went on my first-ever radio tape. also went on the infamous ‘perks’ mixtape, for those of you playing along at home.
5. upbeat, pop-lite. practical, diplomatic state-of-the-union tune. hard strumming, ripply chords, full band sound. moonbeamy, eric-johnson-style over-the-water electric guitar solo. “even if i am in love with you, all this to say, what’s it to you?”
6. pretty straight mid-slow fingerpicking and hard-nosed, mind’s-made-up vocals. chick’s-side-of-the-story callback to rod stewart’s “maggie may”. the album version is one of my fave suzanne vega songs, for obvious reasons.
7. slow circular slide-audible minor guitar. muted saloon piano. borderline sultry. combines atmospheres of wanderlust, loneliness, and all the basic elements of a sea shanty.
*8. niiiice version of this. a slinky and eerie song that calls up images of ghosts and lampposts. creepy-crawly (think: itsy bitsy spider, alternately: lullaby by the cure) bass-like guitar flat-picking. great use of sparse slip-n-slide electric guitar. i thought i was going to miss the cymbals, but the arrangement here is very cool.
9. mid-fast fingerpicking. sad, pretty, haunting and spare narrative about a long-ago affair with a married man. twin feelings of being used and being responsible. you can hear the expanse of time in it. “it’s nineteen years late for repairs.”
10. off-the-beat poppy handclappy syncopated jaunt that mirrors the personality of the character it describes. cutting, sneaky, playful vocals. this may be vega’s most famous bi-curious song.
11. midtempo, full strummed sound, some violin, piano. expansive, echo seascape effects. audible lust for adventure and intrigue. this song kills me. “if i had met you on some journey, where would we be now?”
12. darkly minor. oh, that’s diminished. slow. naked, crystal high-register vocals. she sounds like she’s about to choke up. meditation on age, tiredness, neediness, commitment.