Label: Amanuensis Productions
Release Date: February 2, 2010
Release Date: May 18, 2010
Romance is the initial theme for Suzanne Vega as she launches the first of a four CD acoustic retrospective looking back on over 25 years of trendsetting songcraft. Available now through her website and digitally at iTunes and Amazon (and May 18 at retail), Close Up Volume 1: Love Songs features new versions of twelve romantically-themed songs taken from Vegas' extensive body of work including "Caramel", "If You Were In My Movie" and "Marlene On the Wall". Over the course of the next two years Vega will follow up Love Songs with three additional collections of reworked songs: future retrospective volumes will address People, Places and Things, States of Being and Songs of Family.
Always considered one of our most thoughtful and intelligent writers, Vega succeeds in making the new "stripped" versions of her handpicked songs -- including a number of interesting, left-of-center choices -- sound, in many respects, even fresher than when they were released. Her voice has an even greater depth and warmth and with many of the 80's and 90's electronic embellishments now eliminated from the production the songs have both greater subtlety and more powerful immediacy. Vega, says Wears the Trousers, is "a writer of literary sophistication...of the Leonard Cohen school of evocative imagery and poetic inventiveness. There is rarely a word out of place, and each song is delivered with a cool poise."
Suzanne Vega - "Gypsy" (from the album Close Up Vol. 1: Love Songs)
Suzanne Vega - "Marlene on the Wall" (from the album Close Up Vol. 1: Love Songs)
The tour dates:
04/09 – Buffalo, NY @ Buffalo State College Performing Arts Center
04/10 – West Long Branch, NJ @ Monmouth University (Pollack Theater)
04/17 – Paducah, KY @ Carson Four Rivers Center
04/18 – Nashville, TN @ Belcourt Theatre (Jubilee Concerts LLC)
04/20 – Greenville, NC @ East Carolina University (Wright Auditorium)
04/22 – Rochester, MN @ Mayo Civic Center (Riverside Concerts)
04/24 – Madison, WI @ Overture Center – Capitol Theater
The first in a proposed four-volume collection of intimate re-recordings of Suzanne Vega's catalog, Close Up, Vol. 1 focuses on Vega's love songs, which means that her two biggest hits, "Luka" and "Tom's Diner," are nowhere to be heard. best-known tune here may be "Marlene on the Wall," a song from her 1985 debut, which indicates that this is a bit of a crate-digging exercise, reaching deep into various corners from throughout her career. Vega's new arrangements are anchored on acoustics but not strictly stripped naked: there are other guitars, sometimes electrics, along with traces of bass and percussion, enough to give this some texture and shade but not enough to distract from the songs themselves, all of which are nicely chosen and warmly delivered. There are no radical reinterpretations, only unadorned readings that reveal the sound structure of her readings and her sly, subtle singing. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
