Days of Open Hand by Suzanne Vega

Days of Open Hand, Suzanne Vega's third album, came out on A&M on April 10, 1990, and anyone expecting another round of the successful Solitude Standing got something knottier. Vega produced it with Anton Sanko, who co-wrote six of the eleven songs, and the pair spent late 1989 and early 1990 moving between New York studios, loading her spare folk rock with a digital Fairlight CMI, an analog Voyetra-8, the ney and the dumbec. Philip Glass, Shawn Colvin and They Might Be Giants' John Linnell all turn up along the way.

The result is cool, intricate and brainy, with arrangements that twist where the old ones walked a straight line. America shrugged: it stalled at 50 on the Billboard 200 and threw off no hit single, though Britain sent it into the top 10 and it still sold past a million. The reviews were mostly kind, and the Grammys nominated it for Best Contemporary Folk Recording and handed it Best Recording Package.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.