Download Suzanne's latest album on iTunes... On Beauty & Crime, Suzanne Vega’s Blue Note Records debut, the Manhattan native uses New York City as the backdrop for a collection of eleven new songs that juxtapose acoustic guitar-driven melodies with coolly synthesized beats; intensely personal lyrics with compelling, short story-like narratives; images of today’s scarred cityscape with memories of Vega’s old Upper West Side ‘hood and Lower East Side haunts. The past commingles with the present, the public with the private, familiar sounds with the utterly new, just like the city itself. Making her first new studio album in six years, Vega says, “I feel like I really stretched my limits. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone—to sing in keys I wouldn’t have sung in before, to work with different textures, to be unafraid of doing what ever sounded good to me. I wanted to make a modern classic.”
For fans that have grown up with her, Beauty & Crime is a revealing look into Vega’s continual evolution as songwriter and recording artist. For newcomers, it affords an opportunity to discover a unique voice that has, much like fellow die-hard New Yorker Lou Reed’s, been shaped by keenly observing urban life, glancing down the side streets and peering into the shadows, empathizing with the outsiders and dreamers, the helpless and the hopeful. Reed isn’t a far-fetched comparison: Vega, a fan, has said she’d been listening to his Berlin the day she wrote “Luka,” the economically arranged, emotionally devastating story of domestic abuse from her second album, Solitude Standing, which became a surprise worldwide hit in 1987.
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www.myspace.com/suzannevega
