When Suzanne Vega announced on stage at Dubai Opera on Thursday that she would sing her most memorable songs first, I started to fear that it might be an early night.
“Whenever I go and see someone in concert, I always want to hear the songs I know first, before they go on to do their more recent stuff,” said the 58-year-old American folk singer, who was assisted on stage by David Bowie’s former musical director Gerry Leonard.
Given that by this stage the brilliant Marlene on the Wall, from her eponymous 1985 debut album, had already been second on her set-list, I felt deploying her other two hits Luka and Tom’s Diner so soon into proceedings would leave us without much to look forward to.
As it happened, both those two tracks from her 1987 second album Solitude Standing were indeed left rightfully until the end before the encore, and fears of being left clutching at the more obscure elements of her repertoire were allayed.
Maybe this was a tactic to leave us on tenterhooks listening out for those expected additions to be weaved into the set earlier than expected, but the wait for them was by no means agonising, in fact it made the hour-long 17-song concert fly by.
After opening with the upbeat Fat Man and Dancing Girl, she then went into Marlene on the Wall, Caramel and Small Blue Thing.
She then regaled about how her next song Gypsy, written when she was 18, but only added onto her second album Solitude Standing, was about her first love from Liverpool, whom she met while both were councilors on summer camp.
These humourous recollections led into how she then travelled to Liverpool years later on tour and thought about the same boy while writing her next song In Liverpool. They did in fact meet years later in London.
Punctuating each track with the story behind each song certainly warmed her to the crowd and made even the most expansive and grand of settings - backlit with four simple stage lights - seem small and intimate.
She changed pace with a sad and slower ballad The Queen and Soldier, and then explained how Horizon was written for the late Czech President Vaclav Havel, adding that it made as much sense in today’s politics as it did when he died in 2011.
These snapshots into Vega’s leanings, with her even broaching her Buddhist beliefs ahead of songs written about novelist Carson McCullers, about whose life she wrote a play as well as her latest of nine albums, showed that there was so much more to the multifaceted singer than just her three main songs.
Unfortunately, just as quickly as we had discovered this, she wrapped up with New York is My Destination, Left of Centre, I Never Wear White and Some Journey leading into the big two, and then came out for Blood Makes Noise, Calypso and Carson’s Last Supper in the encore. Masterfully, she left you wanting more, not just of her music, but also her little insights, making it like prizing yourself away from someone that you could have spoken to all night.
