I've known Suzanne Vega since 1983, when she was a receptionist at a publishing company and sent some lyrics to me at the New York office of Newsday. The words were either to "Cracking" or "Small Blue Thing," and both later appeared on her 1985 self-titled debut album for A&M Records, produced by Steve Addabbo and the Patti Smith Group's Lenny Kaye.
The idea was to curry interest in her appearances at Folk City, then brought back to life by Robbie Woliver and Marilyn Lash. Something was happening there, a singer-songwriter collective performing individually at Folk City and other Village clubs with a 'zine and monthly album sampler called "Fast Folk." Other artists included Jack Hardy, Shawn Colvin, Lucy Kaplansky, David Massengill, John Gorka, Christine Lavin, Richard Shindell, and Erik Frandsen, with cameos by Lyle Lovett and Dave Van Ronk. (These artists all appear on the 2002 Smithsonian Folkways collection, Fast Folk: A Community of Singers and Songwriters.)
It was the biggest New York folk scene since a Bob Dylan appearance at the club in 1961 was enthusiastically reviewed by Robert Shelton of The New York Times. The review launched Dylan, and he never looked back. Stephen Holden of the Times and I both reviewed Vega at Folk City, and we jokingly called ourselves "Suzanne's Robert Sheltons."
Vega's career really took off with her 1987 album Solitude Standing, with two unlikely hit singles. "Luka," a compassionate tale told from the point of view of a neurodivergent young man, hit No. 3 on the Billboard pop singles chart. Three years later, an unaccompanied bit of poetic whimsy called "Tom's Diner," a former Vega hangout when she went to Barnard College, was remixed and adapted by DNA, a pair of turntable jockeys from Bristol, England. (Tom's Diner, the place, was also the exterior for "Monks" on Seinfeld.) It too hit the pop charts (top five) and gave Vega more radio and club cred. Other Vega tracks from the beginning, such as "Marlena on the Wall," were hits in Europe, which secured a prolific worldwide touring career and a series of many more albums. She has nearly 3 million monthly Spotify listeners.
Her new album, Flying with Angels, is her first of new material in 10 years, and, I think, her best album. (It was also released May 2, 2025, almost 40 years to the day after the A&M Records debut, Suzanne Vega.) It is produced and arranged by Gerry Leonard, her musical sounding board and collaborator since 2008. Leonard was the guitarist on the Rupert Hine-produced 2001 Vega album Songs in Red and Gray, some of which was about the breakup of her marriage to musician/producer Mitchell Froom. They had a daughter, Ruby Froom, now 30. For the last 16 years, Vega has been married to poet-lawyer-activist Paul Mills.
"I could see he was a really brilliant guy," Vega says of Leonard. "He told me during the making of that [Songs] album, 'You know I can play your guitar parts just like you do. I thought that was interesting, but not really relevant, because I was playing my own guitar parts the way I do. I said, Great, okay, terrific.
"Songs in Red and Gray came out right after 9/11," Vega continued. "And two days before 9/11, I had this accident on my bicycle, where I broke my left arm. So suddenly I couldn't play my guitar, and we were going on tour to promote the album. And I said, 'Where is that guy who said he can play my guitar the way I do?' I found him and said, please please come on tour with us. I need you. I can't play the guitar. I did that whole tour with him, Gerry playing all my parts and all his own parts. Which was, you know, really quite something. So that's how everything started, and since then he became the musical director in, I guess, 2008, and we started to play as a duo. And then, since then we've played an all variety of formats, we've played as a full band. We've played just the two of us. We've added people piecemeal." (Ruby Froom sings backup on some of the tracks on the new album.)
Born, raised, and a permanent resident of Manhattan, Vega had been working for years in the 2010s on a song cycle about the author Carson McCullers (author of "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter"). It had three "launches" in Houston, but Vega thinks she's now done with it. Working in theater helped expand her range and confidence as a vocalist and performer.
"In the beginning of the rehearsal process, I just kept apologizing and saying 'I'm so sorry, I really don't know what I'm doing,'" Vega said during a Zoom interview May 12, 2025. "Finally, this woman, the director, said, 'Just stop doing that. Stop apologizing. This is the rehearsal. This is where you learn what you're supposed to do and what works. So I stopped apologizing and I let myself feel really stupid, which I did for a while, and then, I got it together, and I felt I learned enough to give a good performance."
The day before our interview, I had a teenage rock and roll experience with what should be the most talked about and listened to song on the new album, "Chambermaid." I had it on in the car and played it over and over again, four or five times in an endless loop, windows open, speakers blasting. Like one would do with a rocking Springsteen song. Which is close, in a way. Because "Chambermaid" is an adaptation and reworking of Bob Dylan's 1966 hit "I Want You." If one wanted to be arch about it, one could say that "I Want You" is from the Dylan hit singles album known as Blonde on Blonde, because the album also contains "Just Like a Woman" and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35."
The first time I listened to "Chambermaid," I thought, OK, the first verse is an homage, and then Vega is going to change the chords, melody, the verse structure, to make it a different song. But she doesn't, except for leaving out Dylan's chorus, "I want you...so bad." The chambermaid is one character in the Dylan song: "Well, I return to the Queen of Spades/And talk with my chambermaid/She knows that I’m not afraid to look at her." (The small print: the song is "an adaptation of 'I Want You' written by Bob Dylan. Copyright (c) 1966, Universal Tunes." Vega and her team sought and received Dylan's approval.)
It's not strictly coincidental that Vega's debut album has a song called "The Queen and the Soldier." In "Chambermaid," a key verse is "I used to pretend that I was Queen/But over time I quit that scene/Costs too much to even dream in that direction." I heard this as Vega coming to terms with a certain level of fame: Not Dylan-like, or that of Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez, or Carole King, but at a comfortable scale, to have a fine career and a personal life, which she's not at all hesitant to write and sing about.
"There's truth to what you said. Also, you know, there's truth to before I made it big, you know, I had dreams of what? What is stardom, and what would that be like, and success? And then I've had a lot of that. Fame is a good place to visit, but you don't always want to live there."
There is great musical variety on the album. "Love Thief" is a slinky grind into Philly soul, "quiet storm" R&B. "That's the music I was listening to when I was 11, when 'Superfly' and 'Shaft' had come out, and all my schoolmates were listening to that music and discussing which one was better: Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield." Vega at the time was attending what she calls "a wild children's experimental school," the Children's Community Workshop School on 88th Street and Columbus Avenue, in 1971. Ruth Messenger, who later became Manhattan borough president, was one of her teachers.
"The Witch" brings one into Vega's home life. It is what it appears to be: about a series of strokes suffered by husband Paul Mills. "We spent the COVID years in fear because Paul had underlying conditions, and we knew that if he caught COVID that it could be serious," Vega said. "And then he did catch COVID, and it was serious, and he had two strokes that weirdly happened about an inch apart away from each other [in his brain], which is crazy, because where a stroke lands in the body is totally random. So he had two strokes, a day apart from each other, and so it hit the speech center not only once, but twice."
Progress is slow but steady. About why she calls the song "The Witch," Vega elaborates. "He was not only a spoken word poet, but in the interim years he became a First Amendment, free speech lawyer whose specialty was protesters. It was so ironic that this man, who had basically the power of speech at the center of his life, was suddenly muted in this very specific way. In an effort to figure out what the heck was going on, and why this happened, I imagined that if this had happened 150 years ago, we might have thought a witch had put a spell on him. Since I'm a Buddhist, and I don't commune with with God, I was thinking, who do I talk to about this? So I created this witch in my mind's eye, and wrote the song in dialogue with this witch who had done this thing to my husband."
Mills' misfortune is echoed in the opening track, "Speakers Corner" which was originally a London landmark in Hyde Park; I envision Allen Ginsberg standing on a wooden crate in Tompkins Square Park, shouting about Moloch. "The speakers corners were very important to Paul," Vega said. "He once told me he was worried that in the world the town squares that to be used for protest or for, you know, people to speak, usually to speak the truth, and not speak nonsense like we have people speaking now, you know, with all this misinformation. But he was worried that too many of the town squares were being used for shopping malls. And that this was a bad trend. So I knew this was something that meant something to him."
There are also two songs in sequence, "Alley" and "Rats," quintessential New York songs if there ever were. Listening to them, the sequence seems like a two-episode arc in a longer streaming series. "Alley," with its hope for transcendence, "like Marc Chagall in love/I'll be moving, be sailing around/Unchained and unbound."
"Rats" is punk rock. Lou Reed is among the people Vega dreams about, she's internalized his clipped, chipped narrative style here. In her 2019 live album An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, she talks about Reed's long influential shadow, and performs "Walk on the Wild Side." On "Rats," she uses that Lou Reed/Jim Carroll "People Who Died" recitative style, about the rats who, supposedly, took over New York when all the sidewalk restaurants in the city during COVID provided so much nourishment to the rodent population. Vega cops to stealing "an angular guitar riff" from the Irish band Fontaines D.C. on "Rats." There's also, by the way, a song called "Lucinda," a rocking tribute to Lucinda Williams, another stroke survivor.
The album ends with a traditional Irish song, in 3/4 time, called "Galway." It's about running into the same man who wants to romance her, in three different places over the course of many years. It is, she says, another true story, both a shaggy dog story, and a ghost story, because from wherever they met, to Woodstock, to San Francisco, she kept running into him, like an apparition. "I see it as a song from the point of view of a woman of a certain age, who's like looking back on her life's choices and thinking, oh, what if I'd gone the other way? Who knows what would have happened?"
I have to keep going back to "Chambermaid." "I took nothing he would miss/But only once I stole a kiss," Vega sings to the melody of "I Want You." This is also a true story.
"I met Bob once, and we had a great talk for about 15 minutes. I opened for him in Norway in 2012, and I did give him a tiny little kiss goodbye on his cheek," Vega says. It is the final verse that really resonates:
He often gives me sage advice/When I dream of him at night/He slips his pen into my hand/And says "don't forget to write." Dreams don't get any better than that. Nor does a career that, after more than 40 years of recording, keeps getting better. Don't forget to write.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
