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Artist
 
Suzanne Vega
 

The Pierces



July 12,2007

General Admission Seated Show / First come, first seated / $10 per person minimum at tables

Concert starts @ 7:30PM
Doors open @ 6 PM
Tickets $30.00 in advance
$33.00 day of show.

SOLD OUT

All Ages

Suzanne Vega
 

Biography

 
 
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.

In Vega’s new material, New York City emerges on its own as subject and setting. As she explains, “My last album [Songs in Red and Gray] came out two weeks after September 11th. That particular album was really personal and it felt really weird to be talking about all these personal songs at a time that wasn’t like any other in New York... I spent a lot of time thinking about things in the last six years, being in New York with my daughter, walking around. It seemed natural to write a bunch of songs that were about New York or little stories that had New York as a character.”

Suzanne Vega homepage

 
   
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