Nine objects of desire

Description

Nine Objects of Desire is Suzanne Vega’s fifth album, released in 1996. It is one of the New York singer’s most acclaimed records. Suzanne Vega, a pleasant folk singer a bit square for worn-out thirty-somethings? Let’s be serious. One can always look for an artist more upright, more honest, more diligent than Suzanne Vega. One can look, but one won’t find one. It is as if the New Yorker fell into a great cauldron of virtue when she was very little. As if to convince oneself that the life and career of a modern artist can also be fluid and luminous, sheltered from doubts, pressures, and compromises. Since Suzanne Vega first appeared on the Greenwich Village folk scene, the same quiet certainty has been pulling the strings of her artistic destiny: twelve years of measured, gradual maturation, refusing boredom and repetition while skillfully avoiding the traps of demagogic songwriting. Let’s be clear: by adding a little water to her wine, a little leather to her wardrobe, and a few guitar solos to her songs, the American could easily have established herself as the Alanis Morissette of the eighties — a nasty nightmare once again crucified by Nine Objects of Desire, her latest middle finger to musical conventions. Three years and a baby later (Ruby, daughter of her producer husband Mitchell Froom), after the first experiments undertaken on 99° F, Vega once again leans into the versatile and the paradoxical: far from classic, this way of writing little wise, quiet songs and then dressing them up like mischievous libertines. Above all, it is unusual in the way it blends the most openly troubling stories — lost loves, found again, always difficult — with a whole series of melodies of deceptive ease. In this world of appearances, where it is sometimes hard to identify the players — is it a guitar? is it a keyboard? — all that remains as an unchanging landmark, as a beacon in the night, is the increasingly warm and ardent voice of the New Yorker, this brilliant and zealous lab technician hiding behind bangs too prim to be honest. One could very easily slip past these Nine Objects of Desire without measuring their intoxicating sensuality — just as one could perfectly well miss Suzanne Vega’s entire body of work. That would mean depriving oneself of the unique pleasure of endlessly plunging back into music that is decidedly very close to Edward Hopper’s slow, faded body of work: straight lines, unsuspected, and simple colors at rest. But also shadows, absences, emptiness. And an extraordinary world to decipher.