Flying With Angels

I have written in this blog before about how Suzanne Vega has been my favourite singer for a very long time – since 1986, which was one of the most challenging years of my life.

Her self titled debut album was released in May 1985, and the first single from that album started to get airplay in Australia in February 1986 – a very different time when the internet was not ubiquitous so we did not get our TV shows or music released at the same time as the US or Europe. I became very familiar with that debut album very quickly, and then bought the follow up, Solitude Standing, in 1987 when it was released in Australia.

Whilst most people regard Solitude Standing as the best of her work, I still enjoy the debut album, which seems to be mostly acoustic guitar, the most.

She did quite a few albums after that, although I was not as big a fan of all of them. I first saw her perform live in July 1993 at what we now call Hamer Hall when she was touring to promote her fourth album, 99.9F degrees. I had listened to that album enough by then to consider it weaker than her earlier work, but performed live, there was not a weak song in the set.

It was in 1996 or 1997 that she released her fifth album, 9 Objects of Desire. That album went in a different direction to what I was used to from her, and I was a little disappointed.

In 1999, when I was working in Canberra, she released Tried and True, her first Greatest Hits album – it had two new tracks on it which were well worthy of inclusion on any of her first three albums (Rosemary, and A Book and a Cover). At age 30, I said to myself that when someone I have been a fan of since my teenage years releases a Greatest Hits, I was getting old. She rereleased her Greatest Hits under the title Retrospective a few years later.

I still buy every album when it comes out (only two post the Greatest Hits releases), and I do try to get tickets when she tours, provided I have enough notice. Last time I saw her was at the Palais in August 2018 (or was it 2019?). Deborah Conway and Willie Zygier were the supporting act, and I do suspect that in their home town, the supporting act are more popular (even though I was disappointed Conway did not perform any of her own classics off String of Pearls).

Now Suzanne Vega is back, with Flying With Angels, her first studio album in a very long time. It was released less than a week ago, and I put aside some time on Tuesday night to stream the entire album through my Apple Music subscription. It is great that we can, with the miracle of the internet, stream music in Australia at the same time as it is released in the USA – we don’t have to wait for months as in the olden days.

I find it to be a great album. There are no songs which stand out particularly, but it does sound so much in the style of her earlier work from the mid 1980s as to fill me with joy, as if I was still on the northern edge of seventeen, about to embark on life, rather than in late middle age and a self funded retiree.

This might be the 21st Century, but I am not content to just rely on internet streaming to access this album. Today I decided to buy it in CD format. I first visited JB Hi Fi at Highpoint where I found, to my mild disappointment, that none of her music was for sale. So I went online. Amazon was offering it for about $40, and JB Hi Fi was offering it for about $30. I signed up for the JB Hi Fi loyalty program, got a $10 welcome voucher, so, with postage, it will cost me about $23.

True, I will have to wait until early July, but I am in no hurry for the CD to arrive. I mostly just want it for the peace of mind. I might even unpack my CD player, which still sits unused in its unopened box.