© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
NPR Music: Tiny Desk Concerts
Tiny Desk Concerts from NPR's All Songs Considered features your favorite musicians performing at Bob Boilen's desk in the NPR Music office. This is the AUDIO only archive.Are you a fancy A/V nerd and need video? Visit our new Tiny Desk Concert video channel. Eye-popping video and all of the music you've come to expect.

Suzanne Vega: Tiny Desk Concert

By Stephen Thompson
Published February 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM MST

In pop-music circles, Suzanne Vega is known almost entirely for two songs from the late 1980s: the child-abuse ballad "Luka" and a song that launched literally dozens of dance remixes, "Tom's Diner." But Vega has been making vital, inventive music the entire time — much of it folk-based, though her sound has taken many smart detours along the way — and is about to put out her first album of original material in seven years, Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles. The challenge, then, lies in capturing a snapshot of her career in only four songs.

For this Tiny Desk Concert — performed with her brilliant guitarist and producer, Gerry Leonard — Vega splits the difference evenly between old and new, bookending her set with the aforementioned classics and tucking two about-to-be-released songs in the middle. Game and good-spirited throughout, Vega performed "Luka" and "Tom's Diner" as if she hadn't played them thousands of times before — aided greatly by Leonard, who's worked extensively with David Bowie and lends these songs an extraordinary amount of color and texture. (Check out the "bells" he adds near the end of "Tom's Diner.")

Vega's songwriting gifts haven't waned at any point in her long career, and the new songs here — taken from a concept album about the way our world and the spiritual realm intersect — sound as sharp as anything she's done. It only makes sense that, nearly 30 years after her debut, she still examines new realms with grace, empathy and an explorer's spirit.

Set List

  • "Luka"

  • "Crack In The Wall"

  • "I Never Wear White"

  • "Tom's Diner"

    • Credits

    Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Olivia Merrion; photo by Meredith Rizzo/NPR

    Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

    Tags
    Tiny Desk Concerts
    Stephen Thompson
    Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
    See stories by Stephen Thompson
    Related Content
    • Fanfare Ciocarlia: Tiny Desk Concert
      Bob Boilen
      From wedding songs to American rock 'n' roll to the occasional James Bond theme, the joyous Balkan brass band plays at a pace that would make the Ramones burst into a sweat.
    • Pixies: Tiny Desk Concert
      Bob Boilen
      This three-song set features a 2014 tune called "Greens and Blues," a song yet to make it onto a Pixies release called "Silver Snail," and 1989's "Monkey Gone to Heaven," which melted hearts and seared minds with a new memory from a time long past.
    • Angel Olsen: Tiny Desk Concert
      Bob Boilen
      The powerful singer previews songs from her album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Watch her and you'll see calm in her eyes; listen to her and you'll sense torment in her heart.
    Load More