Of the Suzanne Vega tracks that you are likely to have heard before, only Marlene On The Wall can be found on this album, the others coming later. Apparently the track Small Blue Thing was a single as well although I don’t remember it. I wonder if I hadn’t absorbed it unconsciously, though, because it really stood out to me, a delicate and beautiful track that’s the first one in ages where I had to drop whatever else I was doing and just listen to it.
The album feels like it’s the first singer-songwriter type for a long while (probably the closest was Springsteen’s Nebraska), with the tracks mostly featuring Vega on acoustic guitar and minimal accompaniment. Considering the list of personnel is quite lengthy I can only assume that each of them are on one track and few others since the overall sound is far from crowded; the stripped-back folky sound a bit of an oasis amid highly produced synth-pop or raucous garage rock.
The Queen And The Soldier is the most traditionally folk, a ballad about doomed love, but the rest are at least folk adjacent, largely about relationships in a complex poetic fashion. Undertow, for example, where Vega’s voice rises above her usual slightly laconic tones, is about a kind of obsessive love “I believe right now if I could I would swallow you whole, I would leave only bones and teeth, we could see what was underneath. And you would be free then.”
It’s one of those albums that feels like any track would fit right in on the soundtrack of an indie Sundance Festival film, but the overall tone is hopeful rather than bleak; I found it a delightful little gem.
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