musician magazine article, November 1996
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Suzanne Vega Battles Burl Ives in Nine Objects of Desire by Chuck Crisafulli On an unseasonably hot Hollywood day, there is a flurry of activity within the cooled confines of Studio B at the Sunset Sound Factory. Tracks are nearly completed for Nine Objects of Desire, the first Suzanne Vega album in four years, and with a playback for studio brass scheduled tomorrow, producer Mitchell Froom (Vega's husband) and engineer Tchad Blake are working hard to polish their rough mixes. In the midst of the purposeful chaos, Vega is a figure of poise and resolute calm. "I had such a hard time writing these songs that I'm just grateful to get anything done," she explains, taking a break from what she hopes will be her final vocal track. "It's hard to know what to make of the music this time, because we worked really fast. I was finishing lyrics in the studio, trying to hold off Mitchell and Tchad: 'Give me ten minutes and you'll have a song with better rhymes!' " If the rough tracks are any indication, Vega's incisive poetry is in fine form, and her gracefully sensual vocals are well set atop the varied sonic pastiches that Froom and Blake have created. "Headshots" is a piece of nearly perfect pop that finds Vega closing the book on a romance of old, while the gentle melody and insistent rythms in "Stockings" describe an odd friendship tested by nylons and gin and tonics. On most of the tunes, the precision rock drumming of Pete Thomas combines with the looser world-music percussion work of Jerry Marotta to creat wide engaging grooves, while the arrangements contain everything from reggae bass loops to Indian strings to an amplified Vega exhalation. "It's hard not to get into sounds when you're working with Mitchell and Tchad," says Vega. "They're always coming up with imaginative ideas, and if they fit the song, we use them. If I listen back and say, 'What's that horrible noise?', it's not going to stay in. They argue for twisting the song, and I argue for keeping it more straightforward. I think that's called creative tension," she laughs. Vega hopes the result of that tension, due out in September, will get a more positive response than the one it prompted from her newest fan: two-year-old daughter Ruby. "She likes 'Caramel,' and she thinks that 'Birthday,' which was written for her, is okay. But, frankly, she enjoys Burl Ives more than anything we've been working on lately." submitted by Unique212@aol.com
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