Album Reviews

At a time when the shortsighted have all but declared the album form either dead or dying, Suzanne Vega's latest one (issued on CD July, 2007 and more recently on vinyl by Classic Records) is a cool reminder that putting together a coherent program of well-produced (and carefully recorded) tunes remains a most satisfying musical art form. The album won a well-deserved Grammy, this past February (2008), for "Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical."

Though still possessed of a girlish voice, the 48-year-old Vega seems to have hit her middle aged stride on this cool, quintessentially New York set in which she assesses her past and long since vanished scenes, beginning with the Lou Reed-ish "Zephyr and I." Looking down West End Avenue with her late brother Tim's friend, the graffiti artist Zephyr, she recalls the now vanished 1970's scene. "Now the kids are gone, but their souls remain," she sings with soft resignation.

"Ludlow Street," the street where her brother once lived, continues the theme, as she describes going back to an incomplete scene, with him gone, replaced by "Another generation's parties."

In "Frank and Ava," ostensibly about the volatile Sinatra, Gardner relationship, when she sings the lyric "their chemistry, like you and me, proved to keep them both apart for life, and so now we know, it's not enough to be in love," the song might be about her relationship with her ex, producer Mitchell Froom, to whom she was married from 1995-1998 (she sang about that as well, on a previous album), or it might just be about a couple who were great in, but not out of the sack.

"She's a Pornographer's Dream," is a more straightforward bossa-nova rhythm-ed tune that sounds to these ears, inspired by the French synth duo Air.

"Bound" appears to be about her rekindled love affair (after 24 years) with her current husband, lawyer/poet Paul Mills. It's one those "now that I'm used goods, will you still have me" songs that only women can write.

Here's where this review gets personal. I'm reading the credits on the beautifully packaged gatefold jacket and I note a dedication to her husband Paul Mills. The name sounds familiar to me. I look on the other side of the inside jacket and there's what appears to be a wedding photo and I know the face. A flood of indistinct memories rush forth and I have an image, a voice, a vocal cadence of a very young Paul Mills from back in Boston during the early 1970's.

I definitely hung out with this guy, either at Fusion magazine or socially, but definitely somewhere in the Boston scene and of course that triggers a torrent of unrelated memories of the time and place that all seem to tie into the album's basic theme.

I then do a web search for Mr. Mills and find that he was a New York City based street poet and performance artist who called himself Poez. A photo of him as young man turns up in the Google search and that clinches it! It's the Paul Mills I knew. I find his website and it turns out he's performing in New York the evening of the day this review was written.

Now back to review: this is a relatively short collection but it goes deep, aided both by Ms. Vega's tantalizingly aloof, yet somehow intimate performances and by the moody, sympathetic, ever shifting string and woodwind accented production. New accents lurk around every ethereal corner. Though it was issued in the summer, the album has a cool, comfortable, low ceiling, rainy day vibe.

Recorded at Sear Sound and London's famed Olympic Studios, among other places, the sound is warm and appropriately tubey, while keeping a safe distance appropriate to an exercise in deeply felt memories.