The Best of Suzanne Vega: Tried and True

AMG Review of The Best of Suzanne Vega: Tried and True

Ted Mills
All Music Guide

This excellent overview of Vega's career contains all the hits and a fair sampling from each of her five albums, though Days of Open Hand receives a cold shoulder (only "Book of Dreams" represents it here), being a critical and personal failure. The CD as a whole shows that while Vega has stayed fairly consistent as a songwriter, her growth has been marked in the collaborations with various producers, from the spare, simplistic sound stages of Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye to the lush metallurgy of Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake. The collection also features that bane of fans, the exclusive track, necessitating purchasing the CD when one owns all the other material. However, these two new songs -- "Book & a Cover" and "Rosemary" -- are quality entries in Vega's songbook, and once again feature the production skills of Froom and Blake.