21 Suzanne Vega “Marlene on the Wall”

Suzanne Vega is an artist that I always forget how much I like until I hear a song pop on. I rarely skip her on shuffle, but my forgetfulness means I don’t have as much background about her on the tip of my mind. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I try to do limited to no research for these, as I want it to represent what I’m thinking about or what stands out to me for these songs. I believe she started as an acoustic solo artist before getting signed to a label, but that’s about it. Probably the first time I heard her was on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack. 

So, let’s look at the song. We have an fairly uptempo acoustic guitar driving the piece with drums acting less as straight forward time keeping, but with off-beat emphasis reminiscence of a latin groove, though I don’t see it as a danceable one. Of course, I learned to play guitar so I wouldn’t have to dance, so what do I know? 

There is an electric guitar that has a prominent solo in the middle of the song and that helps with the breakdown end of the chorus. We also have something that we don’t really get in many pop/rock songs, especially post 80s, a key shift. Key shifts are when you change the basic “key” of the piece of music, that is, what notes sound right together in the piece. 

Let’s say you have a set of notes that sound good together, usually described as a scale of some name or sort. Let’s call this first set C. Then, there is another set of notes that sound good together, another scale, let’s call that one E. Now, the notes in set C and the notes in set E may have some notes in common, but you can’t use the entire set from C and the entire set of E at the same time without it sounding, well, weird. Weird may be what you want, but that’s not something that would fit with a key change. So switching the set of notes C with the set of notes E while keeping the same tempo, melodic spacing, and so on, is a key change. The feel of a key change is one of jumping in sound.* 

Similar to Peter Murphy’s “Crystal Wrist,” there’s a repetitive lyrical structure with a breakdown at the end of the chorus. The word choice is not something you’ll need a thesaurus for, but the lyrics and rhymes have a syncopation to them that make them a delight to follow along with. I can picture Marlene’s mocking smile every time, even without a music video. 

*Trying to write about sound is difficult, but it’s kind of amazing that we can use terms like “jumping” and understand what that means even though there is nothing actually like jumping in the music.