Concert Review—Suzanne Vega at Queens College

Suzanne Vega

Kupferberg Center for the Arts, Queens College, Flushing, Queens

September 27, 2004

suzannevega.com

Suzanne Vega at Queens College

When I first saw Suzanne Vega, on the 1987 Solitude Standing tour at Massey Hall in Toronto, I was struck not only by her pinpoint songs, which tell personal stories in a fresh and direct way with that crystalline conversational voice, but also by her natural stage presence and amusingly deadpan anecdotes, which were as illuminating as those sharply cutting songs.

That dual ability was still on display at Queens College’s Lefrak Concert Hall—the first time, the longtime Manhattan resident said, she’s ever played a concert in Queens, a borough she remembered as the destination for holiday visits to her aunt’s place in Jamaica—for a stop on Vega’s latest tour, titled Old Songs, New Songs and Other Songs. 

Although those of us who’ve seen Vega many times (this was my ninth time, in nine different venues in New York State and Canada—plus the two times I saw her perform off-Broadway, in Carson McCullers Talks About Love and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) have heard these stories before, she always makes them sound fresh and new, even when recounting for the umpteenth time the genesis of her lovely paean to young love, “Gypsy.”

Unsurprisingly, her durable “Old Songs” were the primary focus, right from the opening “Marlene on the Wall,” from her eponymous debut album and one of Vega’s signature tunes; Vega donned a top hat as she sang, in a tip of the hat to Marlene Dietrich. Next up were the bouncy title track from her 99.9 F° album and the somber ballad “Caramel.” Throughout the evening, as Vega alternated between playing acoustic guitar and simply singing, her longtime musical collaborator Gerry Leonard contributed both atmospheric and stinging lead guitar lines.

Gerry Leonard (left) and Vega

The rest of the show mixed songs from her debut (“Small Blue Thing,” “The Queen and the Soldier,” “Some Journey”), her two hits (“Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” forever ruined by the NDA remix, like Clapton turning “Layla” into a comatose ballad) and a handful of songs from the ‘90s, 2000s and 2010s (“In Liverpool,” “Tombstone” and the haunting final encore “Rosemary”). 

Among the “Other Songs” was Vega’s surprisingly faithful cover of Lou Reed’s downtown classic, “Walk on the Wild Side,” which she has been performing live on several tours. The “New Songs” comprised two tunes, so new that Vega sang them reading from lyric sheets: the nicely observational “Speaker’s Corner,” which tackled free speech; and the sardonic but crudely metaphorical “Rats,” about rodents overwhelming New York City.

Among the many gems in Vega’s set, standing out was “Penitent,” from her criminally overlooked 2001 album Songs in Red and Gray, which had the misfortune of being released a couple weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks. One of her most beautiful but heartbreaking songs about a broken relationship, it was performed with the mournful passion that is Vega at her most compelling.