Songs of Family - Suzanne Vega 2012
Lyrically, these three songs naturally bear the mark of being written by a younger and less mature Vega, but all are nice acquaintances and actually quite different. "Brother Mine" is an almost up-beat song with a piano adding to the bass and guitar accompaniment. "Silver Lady" is a nice silent acoustic song, which Vega reportedly had at the live repertoire the early years. "Daddy is White" is partly spoken and has a certain musical relationship with "Walk on the Wild Side".
Compared with the original versions, most songs are more sparsely instrumented, but guitarist and arranger Gerry Leonard provides both variety and terrific guitar-playing, and with perhaps a few exceptions ("Tired of Sleeping" and "Pilgrimage"), the songs measure well with the originals .
In particular, I find "Rosemary", "World Before Columbus", "Honeymoon Suite" and "Ludlow Street" very successful.