Album Review: Beauty & Crime by Suzanne Vega

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.

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