nine objects of desire tour, 1996
 nine objects of desire |
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Q Magazine - April 1997 Edition
MATERNAL Suzanne Vega: it's a family affair Corn Exchange, Cambridge. February 9, 1997 Like most old folkies, Suzanne Vega can work a room. "You see I curled my hair in honour of the occasion," she tells the packed house, with a hopeless tug at unkinkably lank locks. Playing the Anglo-Yank language-barrier card, she recalls the time when Tom's Diner remixers DNA told her she looked "knackered" and she snapped, absolutely not, no way was she pregnant. Riding the ripple, she adds that, soon, it turned out she really was "knocked up", courtesy of Mitchell Froom, her producer, keyboad player, now husband too - and right on cue, there's little Ruby calling out "Hey, mom!" from the middle of the front row. A few minutes later mom's into a new song, World Before Columbus, a gentle, lump-in-the-throat declaration of unconditional maternal love: "If your life were taken from me/ All the trees would freeze in this cold ground". Although when she wrote it she feared a tumble into sentimentality, her elegance of delivery holds it steady. A week into their European tour, it has been a hard day for the 24-hour nursery/family circle/road band that is the Frooms. Pre-concert, the renowned Costello, Crowded House and Richard Thompson soundsmith reported that his daughter had been unusually "needy". He towed Ruby away to play with Attraction Pete Thomas's drumkit. "Yeah, sometimes it's like everything's falling apart," shrugs Vega. "She's been sobbing all day, (*cuts to two-year-old's-whine*) I want to go home! So I tell Mitchell and he says, Yeah, but she's always saying that when she *is* home. "The thing I find myself most wanting most of all is a room with a door that I can close, where I can read and write for several hours at a time without being interrupted. When you have a baby you can't do that. The sticky part of the relationahip is if Mitchell's working with another artist and I'm working on my own songs. We wind up doing these unconcious weighings: who really needs sleep and who can coast along without it?" For all that, Vega's music shows no sign of nappy rash. In Cambridge, she finds her stride with a run of seductive pieces from her latest album, Nine Objects of Desire, which serve to justify her contention that motherhood has helped her step beyond that perhaps-too-"orderly" place, her head, and into "a more heartfelt world". Despite the on-stage dark suit, her ordinarily deadpan public face shows its dimples and so does her voice as she goes with the chocolately flow of Caramel, the slinky intimation of mortality that is Thin Man, and the bubbling anticipation of Casual Match. When she finishes Caramel, a male voice at the back moans "Oh, yes" as if recollecting a favourite orgasm. According to Vega, her husband too was a touch agitated when he first heard it. He knew the object of desire therein was not himself. She got "taken to task" until he was persuaded that the whole thing was fictive. It was a rare moment of tension on the artistic front, though. "Our professional relationship is the easy part," she laughs. "My music has always been just a frame for the words: get a simple musical idea, repeat it four times and the song's done. Whereas Mitchell has tremendous imagination. I come in with a basic guitar riff; he plays with it, he opens it up." The family that plays together does a pretty good job at the Corn Exchnge, although, at times, the band's refined precisions rather rattle around the high, narrow hall so that No Cheap Thrill and Fat Man & Dancing Girl become oddly disconnected. As Vega remarked to the handful of struggling jitterbuggers in the aisles, "I know I invited you to dance, but I didn't say it would be easy." However, her own acoustic guitar produces a deal of the impetus, whether leading the band through Rock In His Pocket or solo in Queen And The Soldier. Then, when she finally gets loud and "heartfelt" on Woman On The Tier and the desperate Blood Makes Noise, it's a great release. The set closes, pre-encore, with Birth-Day (Love Made Real). Oddly, while she sings about her 24 hours of labour pains before a Caesarian becomes imperative, enthusiastic fans clap along. Ever equable, Vega presses on, singing, "Strip an find the pace to kneel/ ...Don't touch, don't talk, crawl the wall/ ...Shake all over like an old sick dog/ There's a needle here, needle there, tremble in the fog." This being just a bit "personal", she hopes she's prepared for whatever reaction. "I thought I might feel an idiot singing it, but I don't," she asserts, "I'd never heard a song that tries to recreate the birth experience. I didn't write it to complain, and it's not just about childbirth, it's about any birth struggle. You feel like hell, then you come out all shiny and say, So that's what it's all about! ... After you've stopped shaking." Review by PHIL SUTCLIFFE Set List:
Stockings
Toms Diner Submitted by Pat Kelman
Vega At Best When Band Jumps In by Sandy Masuo In 11 years, Suzanne Vega's music has expanded far beyond its folk-inflected, coffeehouse roots, absorbing elements of world music, jazz, even industrial-style electronics. Yet for all the experimentation that's infiltrated her repetoire, as a singer-songwriter she's still prone to a confounding emotional remoteness; the feelings she describes in her lyrics often seem stronger than the feelings she conveys with her dry-ice smoky voice. At times this detachment works to her advantage, providing an intriguiging contrast for some of the more adventurous music. At others it only drives home the arty conceits of her songs. The most engaging moments of Vega's two-hour show at the El Rey Theater on Wednesday (which was taped for a PBS broadcast) arose from the shifting dynamics of the arrangements - jazzier interludes instigated by her four-piece band during "Fatman" and "Birth-day," the haunting industrial-folk of "Blood Makes Noise," an a cappella rendition of Vega's 1990 hit, "Tom's Diner," with the audience acting as backing vocalists. Whenever the focus shifted to Vega alone with her guitar, the restraint settled in again. Solo acoustic numbers such as "Small Blue Thing" and "Queen and The Soldier," for all their lyrical pathos, were more assertive than impassioned. It's a shame Vega can't invest as much of herself in executing the music as she obviously does in writing it. - SANDY MASUO
Vega Gains Greater Dimension, Depth by Greg Kot Suzannne Vega has found the groove. Sensual bossa novas, be-bopping bass and guitar lines, industrial pings and pongs, bongo pitter patter, snapping fingers, syncopated hand-claps - the music moved at Park West on Thursday as Vega and a four-piece band brought a thrilling new physical dimension to her songs. Many of those songs are so sharply written that words were often enough to shape the mood. Certainly, her acoustic performance of "Small Blue Thing," from her 1985 debut album, needed no embellishment as its vivid, metaphorical images conveyed vulnerability, fragility and wonder in the face of an enveloping love. But the distance traveled was best illustrated by another song Vega performed from that same album, "The Queen and the Soldier." It sounds like a centuries-old Scottish ballad, a throwback to a folk-music past that Vega knew playing the Greenwich Village clubs in New York. It was left a quaint bystander next to the more rhythmically robust offerings from her most recent albums. Much of the material from the 1992 breakthrough "99.9F" was embellished even further, while the songs from the recent "Nine Objects of Desire" were cast in a variety of inventive pop settings that evoked the Beatles in genre-twisting "Revolver" mode. Vega's pleasant but thin voice has filled out a bit, as demonstrated by a robust "Birth-day (Love Made Real)," and her recent melodies bristled with chord changes that delighted the ear and often sparked daring new arrangements. Previously in Vega's music, it was all up to the words to take the listener somewhere. Now the music does, with a flair that was cinematic. "In Liverpool" in particular was transformed, as its melody tumbled out of the sky along with "the boy in the belfry," then reconfigured itself around a guitar riff by Steve Donnelly for a roaring finish. Drummer Pete Thomas waved rattles, shakers and mallets and all mariner of percussion knickknacks, Mitchell Froom conjured a kaleidoscopic variety of buzzers, bells and beeps on his keyboards, and bassist Michael Visceglia expertly navigated a fine line between rhythm and melody. But it was Vega taking the big risk and making it pay off, as the erstwhile folk singer embraced a braver, newer world of rhythm. Opener Jason Falkner played a solo set drawn largely from his tunefully buoyant one-man-band debut, "Jason Falkner Presents Author Unknown." Touching on a wide variety of styles, from baroque flourishes played on a harmonium to edgy punk-pop riffs on electric guitar, the boyish singer squeezed out solid melodies from every inspiration.
SUZANNE VEGA by Sara Scherr Suzanne Vega took the stage of the Electric Factory on Saturday night to a recording of James Bond-like film music. With her long straight hair dyed the color of caramel and her shapley jacket, she could have passed for one of [the] (sic) characters that knows the secret combination and the getaway plans. The New York singer-songwriter opened with "Stockings" from Nine Objects of Desire. As in much of her work, here she uses little details to say a lot about complex characters and how much or how little of their guard they decide to let down. When she did the clanky, industrial-sounding "Woman on the Tier" and "Blood Maks Noise," Vega was better at conveying urban fear and vulnerability than Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and his big scary counterparts. Her four piece backing band -- including Elvis Costello drummer, Pete Thomas, and Vega's producer and husband Mitchell Froom on keyboards and trumpet -- added darker textures to sparse narratives, like the bossa nova "Caramel" and preserved the subtlety of earlier material, like "Small Blue Thing." But for other songs like "Thin Man" and "Birth-day" they seemed to be competing with her. When Vega performed solo and acoustic for "The Queen and the Soldier" and "Knight Moves," you didn't want the band to come back. During the a cappella "Tom's Diner," the audience became her backing band by singing along. Even when they were a little out of time and Vega had to pause and put her hands on her hips before going to the next verse, this exchange was more inspired than the musical work of her bandmates. Submitted by JJENIK@aol.com
BOSTON GLOBE Suzanne Vega's greatest gift is singing solo with an acoustic guitar, weaving the same magic she wove in coffeehouses in the '80s before the song "Luka" made her a national name. Today, she has a band that boasts husband Mitchell Froom on keyboards and long-time Elvis Costello sideman Pete Thomas on drums - but her best moments on Sunday still came when she let the boys take a rest and performed by herself. The show touched upon the many colors that have become Vega trademarks, from the industrial ``Blood Makes Noise'' to the Latin pulse of the new ``Caramel.'' But no matter how good the band was - and this was a first-rate group that Froom describes as his ``dream band'' - it didn't satisfy as much as the nuanced starkness of Vega alone with her folk guitar. The reason may lie partly with Berklee's acoustics, which tend to be boomy for electric bands and far more favorable for acoustic acts. But there's no mistaking the brilliance of Vega by herself, as she confirmed on ``Neighborhood Girls'' and ``The Queen and the Soldier,'' a sensitive tale about a soldier who wants to fight no more. Vega's voice was enthrallingly rich in cerebral, post-Beat-poet imagery that haunts and enlightens. At the very least it needs to be heard, which wasn't always possible when the band started cranking, drowning her out several times. Still, this was a well-paced show played to a house that was about 70 percent full. The band overcame the Berklee acoustics on such rhythmic tunes as the new ``Casual Match'' (with funky bass runs from Michael Visceglia, who has played with Vega for a decade); ``No Cheap Thrill''; and ``Luka,'' the child-abuse anthem that is even more relevant today. Froom added a few tasty computer samples, such as a Middle Eastern string arrangement on ``Headshots.'' Alternately playful and serious, Vega kept listeners off guard. She smilingly joked about her 2-year-old daughter Ruby - who could be heard shrieking in the crowd at one point as Vega looked up maternally - and laughed about why she botched the song ``Fatman and the Dancing Girl.'' Said Vega, ``It wasn't that I forgot the lyrics, but I heard the melody in a whole different way!'' Vega retains a charming offbeat sensibility and is still a singer-songwriter with few peers. Opening act Jason Falkner was very promising. He has played with the Grays and Jellyfish, and his solo set was a delight. He moved from electric and acoustic guitars to harmonium and even to a cover of Magazine's giddy anthem of the underdog: ``A Song from Under the Floorboards.'' Esoteric? Yes, we'll grant you that. But credit Falkner for the idea and the execution. Submitted by Keith Sawyer
Monday, August 5, 1996
POP MUSIC REVIEWS By STEVE HOCHMAN Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest. "I never get to see people play," Sarah McLachlan said from the Starlight Amphitheatre stage in Burbank on Friday, explaining why she recruited Suzanne Vega and Paula Cole to join her on a quickie, two-date tour. So with no more calculation, promotional hype or even new albums to promote (though Vega premiered songs from an album due next month), the three women each gave sets powered by an obvious love of performing. Vancouver-based McLachlan, who has quietly built a sizable, rabid following, took particular advantage of the casual format. Abandoning the lush arrangements of her albums for just drummer Ashwin Sood, bassist Brian Minato and her own piano or guitar, McLachlan left no doubt about her triple-threat talents as a dynamic vocalist, emotive writer and formidable instrumentalist. In the stripped-down setting, she both reached back to her adventurous '70s singer-songwriter influences (underscored by a passionate version of Joni Mitchell's "Blue") and pointed in promising new directions by strapping on an electric guitar for a couple of songs, giving her fluidly poetic, sensual style a grabbing edge. The setting also brought her naturally winning personality to the fore. Vega, too, was a winning presence, as she introduced not only her upcoming album but herself in the role of a new mom, drolly spinning anecdotes about her daughter. While the icy detachment of her old favorites (including "Luka" and the a cappella "Tom's Diner') has held up quite well, the new material--with rich electronic tapestries crafted by her husband, keyboardist Mitchell Froom-- was especially intriguing for its expanded stylistic and emotional range. Sound problems plagued the opening set by Cole, a former Peter Gabriel band member whose 1994 album "Harbinger" was a promising debut. But she sabotaged herself with over-affected vocal mannerisms that obscured her talents. Copyright Los Angeles Times Submitted by Unique212@aol.com
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