Under the guidance of producer Mitchell Froom, who produced 99.9 F° and married her shortly after that album was completed, Suzanne Vega continues to explore more textured and vaguely experimental musical territory on Nine Objects Of Desire. While it is less bold on the surface than its predecessor – most notably, there are no pseudo-industrial rhythms – Nine Objects Of Desire still bears all the trademarks of a Mitchell Froom production. There is cheap, garage-yard percussion scattered throughout the record, layered keyboards, and overly mannered, arty arrangements. It's not as extreme as Froom's work for Los Lobos, for instance, but it is still more self-consciously pretentious than any of Vega's albums, besides 99.9 F°. Vega's songs manage to cut through the murky production more often than not, and while the album doesn't boast her most consistent set of songs, they are on the whole stronger than the ones on her previous record. The songs on Nine Objects of Desire are more classically structured and inviting than the ones on its predecessor – it is only the production that keeps the listener at a distance. And that's ironic, since half of these songs rank among Vega's most personal work.

Being a child of the new generation, I kinda swallowed all of Suzanne Vega's recordings into one full year of listening (even her latest stuff); each record being so richly layered and unique, I took my time with each and it was not easy to decide, but this record, 1996's Nine Objects Of Desire was most definitely my favorite. For one, it's different; it's a jazz-tingled, blues sprinkled, funky instrumentalist love affair with seduction in general. Each song is a short anecdote to passion; and this passion can be as exquisite, yet simple as a plum (My Favorite Plum), as supple as caramel during the envisioning of an intimate evening (Caramel), or a masculine figure to sweep her off her feet (Thin Man – a personal favorite due to its sheer exuberance); some of these songs denote so much sentiment that it makes you wonder how privileged Suzanne Vega was to feel these fundamentally rare emotions, or at least render such a rich retelling of them.
Nonetheless, the topper of the concept of the entire album is that they are really desires; she marvels in the sensations, but there is this prevailing emotion of yearning, which is how life is, for the most part. The near 40 minutes that the album lasts will be like a breather, a snippet of the perfect erotic fantasy, the perfect evening, the perfect love affair, the perfect vocal savoring, even the perfect honeymoon. The album really scratched an itch in me.