Suzanne at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
Two nights, two divas from America that I love so much but who couldn't have been more different.
Whereas Tori was all sound and fury, Suzanne was exactly how you would expect her to be in a live setting. Smallish intimate auditorium with quiet, civilised fans. She herself is cool, relaxed, chatty and funny - charming the audience with little stories of how she came to write the new songs on her album.
Her set was, unfortunately, a lot more predictable than Tori's. She performed the new songs from "Beauty and Crime", and then stuck with tried and tested classics like "Small Blue Thing" and "Luka" throughout with the same arrangements I had heard for two decades now. Don't get me wrong - stock standard Suzanne Vega is still brilliant. And after all these years, her voice still draws you in with that strange mix of intimacy and detachment, a sort of conspiratory tone really. Still, she managed to pull some surprises. I had never heard someone sing with just a bass guitar accompanying her, and this breathed new life into "Left of Center" and "Blood Makes Noise". And her last encore ("Penitent" and "Rosemary") gave a hint of just how powerful these hidden songs in her back catalogue are that never really get played live.
13 years after I watched these women in 1994, I got a rare chance to see them again in London. Tonight (with news of a death of a colleague and a colleague's grandfather in the same day) I wondered again when my next encounter with either of them will be. And suddenly, I felt the fleetingness of life - how Tori, Suzanne, myself, E., K.L. and all the people dear to me are just here now altogether and we don't have many chances really to get it right and make it work.
"Rosemary"
Suzanne Vega
Do you remember how you walked with me
down the street into the square?
How the women selling rosemary
pressed the branches to your chest,
promised luck and all the rest,
and put their fingers in your hair?
I had met you just the day before,
like an accident of fate,
in the window there behind your door.
How I wanted to break in
to that room beneath your skin,
but all that would have to wait.
In the Carmen of the Martyrs,
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.
My sister says she never dreams at night
there are days when I know why;
those possibilities within her sight,
with no way of coming true.
Some things just don't get through
into this world , although they try.
In the Carmen of the Martyrs
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.
All I know of you
is in my memory
All I ask is you
Remember me.
Whereas Tori was all sound and fury, Suzanne was exactly how you would expect her to be in a live setting. Smallish intimate auditorium with quiet, civilised fans. She herself is cool, relaxed, chatty and funny - charming the audience with little stories of how she came to write the new songs on her album.
Her set was, unfortunately, a lot more predictable than Tori's. She performed the new songs from "Beauty and Crime", and then stuck with tried and tested classics like "Small Blue Thing" and "Luka" throughout with the same arrangements I had heard for two decades now. Don't get me wrong - stock standard Suzanne Vega is still brilliant. And after all these years, her voice still draws you in with that strange mix of intimacy and detachment, a sort of conspiratory tone really. Still, she managed to pull some surprises. I had never heard someone sing with just a bass guitar accompanying her, and this breathed new life into "Left of Center" and "Blood Makes Noise". And her last encore ("Penitent" and "Rosemary") gave a hint of just how powerful these hidden songs in her back catalogue are that never really get played live.
13 years after I watched these women in 1994, I got a rare chance to see them again in London. Tonight (with news of a death of a colleague and a colleague's grandfather in the same day) I wondered again when my next encounter with either of them will be. And suddenly, I felt the fleetingness of life - how Tori, Suzanne, myself, E., K.L. and all the people dear to me are just here now altogether and we don't have many chances really to get it right and make it work.
"Rosemary"
Suzanne Vega
Do you remember how you walked with me
down the street into the square?
How the women selling rosemary
pressed the branches to your chest,
promised luck and all the rest,
and put their fingers in your hair?
I had met you just the day before,
like an accident of fate,
in the window there behind your door.
How I wanted to break in
to that room beneath your skin,
but all that would have to wait.
In the Carmen of the Martyrs,
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.
My sister says she never dreams at night
there are days when I know why;
those possibilities within her sight,
with no way of coming true.
Some things just don't get through
into this world , although they try.
In the Carmen of the Martyrs
with the statues in the courtyard
whose heads and hands were taken,
in the burden of the sun;
I had come to meet you
with a question in my footsteps.
I was going up the hillside
and the journey just begun.
All I know of you
is in my memory
All I ask is you
Remember me.
posted by rookcub at
6:13 AM
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