In 2015, David Byrne invited Anna Calvi to perform at the Meltdown Festival of which he is the artistic director. The Brit (Calvi) opted for an unusual arrangement – surrounded by a 12-piece choir – to revisit songs picked from her first two albums, Anna Calvi and One Breath. The recording of this unique show in London was published in 2017 on Record Store Day as a red double vinyl. Now, one year later, we have an official version in Hi-Res 24-Bit. With this unique vocal halo, Anna Calvi’s songs have found an epic, mystic and quite astonishing second wind. Let yourself be carried away by rock which is disconnected from its time and these songs consisting of dark and haunting poetry. Magnificent. © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Suzanne Vega’s musical world involves stories in which characters hold as much importance as the setting they find themselves in. In this moving and delicate live recording, the singer pays homage to New York, one of her favourite cities. Surrounded by her longtime guitarist Gerry Leonard, bassist Jeff Allen and keyboardist Jamie Edwards, Suzanne Vega replays a section of her repertoire on the famous Café Carlyle stage in New York. “It’s a little club which has welcomed legends from Eartha Kitt to Judy Collins, and is also known for being the place where Jackie Kennedy met Audrey Hepburn.”, explains the singer. The hits Luka and Tom’s Diner have naturally been given a well-deserved place in this rich playlist which looks back on a career spanning 35 years that blossomed in the 1980s and continued throughout the 90s. Vega often gives a nod towards 70s folk music in her fragile and sweetly melancholic songs. The concert’s particularly intimate orchestration reinforces this spirit to the point that the same magic is there from the first piano chords and guitar riffs. The recording reaches its climax in a rendition of Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed, one of her idols. Through her tales of the hubbub of the great American city, Suzanne Vega manages to tell a story of her own. © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

Driven by the hit singles "I Am...I Said" and "Crunchy Granola Suite," Stones is a stronger album than most of Neil Diamond's late-'60s records. Instead of padding the album with mediocre originals, Diamond picked several fine covers to fill out the remainder of the album, including Roger Miller's "Husbands and Wives," Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning," Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," Randy Newman's "I Think It's Gonna Rain," Jacques Brel's "If You Go Away," and Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing on My Mind." There are still a few weak patches on Stones, but the record remains an engaging collection of mainstream pop.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Six years in the pop music world is a long time. In fact, for many artists, it's a lifetime or two. Suzanne Vega has been away from recording for a long time, but it isn't because she hasn't been working. She is the subject of Some Journey, a documentary film by Christopher Seufert; in addition, she hosted a memorial concert for her late brother, artist Timothy Vega in 2002, performed with Bill Frisell at the Century of Song concerts in Germany, hosted the American Public Media series American Mavericks (which won a Peabody Award), played a huge gig in Central Park in 2006, played live in the online game Second Life (she was the first artist of many to do so), got remarried, and changed record labels. She's also been writing songs: lots of them. Songs in Red and Gray, her last offering for A&M, was issued just two weeks after 9/11. Beauty and Crime is a lengthy meditation on the city of New York, the place she calls home. These songs glide like a harlequin's ghost through the hearts and minds of city residents past and present, on its streets, in its hotels, apartments, in every corner of the city. There is more than the hint of memory on Beauty & Crime. The album is dedicated to the memory of Tim, who lived on "Ludlow Street" -- the name of the set's second cut, a searing and simply moving tribute to him -- and cites as muses in part "...Edith Wharton and all her heroines...and Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner for their passion," and who have songs named for them here. In doing so, 9/11 itself cannot be left out of the equation, and the album's final two cuts deal with personal versions of this story, one of which is informed by her brother-in-law Angel Ruiz, a New York City cop stationed at Ground Zero after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Most of these songs look at life in the interim, or remembering what the city was like in the '70s as on the cut "Zephyr and I."Musically, this is easily her most adventurous record ever; yet it is also more accessible than any album since her debut. The craft and care put into the songs themselves and their articulation by Vega and producer Jimmy Hogarth are amazing. Here, emotions are laid bare in places whether in the first, second, or third persons, but they are always placed inside elegant yet spare lyrics that are taut, poetic, and evocative. The dreamy soundscape contains layers of guitars, percussion (organic, electronic and live, in one case) strings, reeds, brass, and backing singers (including daughter Ruby Froom who appears on a couple of cuts, and KT Tunstall who appears once). But it's the sound of Vega's acoustic guitar on all these songs that is unmistakably at the top and provides the album's anchor. It's important to note this, simply because it keeps these beautiful pop songs rooted in a new kind of contemporary folk that Vega was a pioneer of in the '80s. And it keeps her rooted to her own catalog, from the beginning to the present. In other words, as she has experimented in the past with all kinds of sounds, she has forever remained herself and never more so than here, whether it's the jazzy, faux bossa nova of "Pornographer's Dream" or its predecessor, the stunning "New York Is a Woman." "Frank and Ava," is a rocking pop tune whose electric and acoustic guitars entwine, seemingly kissing, wrapped around a bassline played by Tony Shanahan from the Patti Smith Group. The deliberate interweaving of strings and her guitar on "Edith Wharton's Figurines" offers a glimpse of the late author's studied cool and dignity as it speaks from the voices of her characters to a songwriter who can see not only herself, but the anonymous millions of others living in and around New York City. "Bound," whose title is attended by a glimpse of Vega's wedding to poet and lawyer Paul Mills (who waited for her for 26 years), along with "As You Are Now," about her daughter (which also contain a photograph of its subject) are among the most nakedly personal songs she has ever written. "Angel's Doorway" is as pointed a musical vignette as one is likely to hear in a pop song. With electric guitars, a seemingly cheesy synth line, droning bassline, and sparkling acoustic guitar with the flat thud of the percussion offers its tonalities of the various voices of those in the city who have been snuffed out but live inside the subject.The final track, "Anniversary," written a year after 9/11, opens with Vega's guitar skeletally framing her melody. It is the contemplative sound of a city that's gone on, changed forever yet forever itself, despite it being "thick with ghosts, the wind whips 'round its circuitries...as they meet you on each corner/meet you on each street..." even as the residents are exhorted to "watch for daily braveries/notice newfound courtesies/finger sudden legacies..." The song isn't a eulogy, it's the sound that does not simply memorialize, but opens a new chapter. Artists have always helped the rest of us make sense of upheaval, tragedy, tumultuous change, confusion and the darkness that often accompanies history. On Beauty & Crime, Vega accomplishes this in spades, but without any ideologies or with empty, overly simplistic ruminations or platitudes. Her grief is personal and so is her sense of gratitude, dignity, and love -- especially when it's hard. The opening words to "Ludlow Street," way back on track two, sum it up directly and may be the credo of the entire album: "Love is the only thing that matters/Love is the only thing that's real/I know we hear this every day/It's still the hardest thing to feel." Beauty& Crime is, without reservation, the defining creative moment of Suzanne Vega's career thus far, and a morally and emotionally communicative recording that instructs even as it confesses from inside, and reports from the margins and becomes, in its graceful impurity, a vision that is singular and utterly direct.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

In musical terms, it is less significant that Mitchell Froom is no longer Suzanne Vega's husband than it is that he is no longer her producer. Although Froom's experimental style helped the singer/songwriter fulfill her desire to expand beyond her folk-pop roots on her fourth and fifth albums, 99 F° and Nine Objects of Desire, his approach actually worked against the material, cluttering her intimate, direct songs with inappropriate percussion tracks and various kinds of sound processing. So, listeners who responded strongly to her first three albums but found the Froom discs off-putting (and there were plenty of them) should be alerted that, sonically, Songs in Red and Gray is ready to welcome back old fans. Produced by Rupert Hine, it has the kind of carefully played acoustic guitar work and close-up vocal miking that characterized Suzanne Vega and Solitude Standing. That makes it easier to appreciate Froom's departure from Vega's personal life as well as her professional one, however. This is very much a divorce album, its songs frequently touching on romantic discord and the resulting fall-out. Vega is both precise and artful in describing the situation. She writes by metaphor, unafraid, on "Machine Ballerina," for example, to mix those metaphors and pile them up. That allows her some emotional distance, but never at the expense of meaning. Her concern with the dissolution of her marriage and its impact on her child is apparent in "Soap and Water" when she sings, "Daddy's a dark riddle/Mama's a headful of bees/you are my little kite /carried away in the wayward breeze," even though the lines make up a succession of metaphors. Her calm, hushed, clear singing only emphasizes the emotional torment the songs trace. The result is an album on a par with her best work.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Listening to this album a quarter century after the fact is an eerie experience; as a Baez fan of the same period and of a politically similar orientation at the time, this reviewer was shocked by the vitriol of the opening number, "(Ain't Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Around," especially given that the shows where this album was recorded dated from 1975. Was anyone (except maybe the Reagan-ites) ever really that angry at the Ford administration? Otherwise, Baez's trembling falsetto is in beautiful shape on songs ranging from Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" to "Oh, Happy Day." The album was recorded on the tour supporting the release of Diamonds & Rust, but nothing of that album except the title track is represented here; rather, Baez performs five Bob Dylan songs (which get the most rousing reception), three of her better originals, including "Blessed Are" and "Diamonds and Rust," and a brace of traditional songs and covers of a handful of other composers' work, including "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." Apart from the opening outpouring of political venom, there's not too much controversy here -- a pair of songs, "Natalia" and "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzett," dedicated to political prisoners and an ambitious but ultimately awkward adaptation of "Stewball" are as topical as most of the show gets. Baez is in superb voice and the backing septet, mostly heard on the second disc, has a surprisingly lean sound. Ultimately, From Every Stage is a good, albeit far slicker follow-up to Baez's two early-'60s live albums on Vanguard, though it says something about the nature of her history at A&M Records that five years into her contract with that label, all but a handful of the songs here were associated with her prior record label.© Bruce Eder /TiVo