By Blake Maddux

Suzanne Vega’s collection of 10 new original songs further solidifies and builds on her reputation as a unique talent among her generation of singer-songwriters.

It has been 40 years since the release of Suzanne Vega’s eponymous debut and nine years since Lover, Beloved, which served as the soundtrack to the play Carson McCullers Talks About Love, which Vega wrote and performed.

Now, to the delight of her fans, she has returned this year with Flying with Angels. This album solidifies and builds on her reputation as a unique talent among her generation of singer-songwriters.

The upbeat, politically aware “Speaker’s Corner” and the amusing, punky, and at least somewhat serious “Rats” were released as the first two singles, but they only scratch the surface of the riches to be found on Flying with Angels.  “Last Train to Mariupol” is a thoughtful rumination on the war in Ukraine; “Chambermaid” and “Lucinda” are reverent salutes to two of her heroes; and “Galway” tells the tale of a decades-long, star-crossed romance on the level of Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing,” and James McMurtry’s “Canola Fields.”

These and the album’s other four songs are just as compelling a reason to see her at the Cabot on June 5 as classics like “Marlene on the Wall,” “Luka,” and “Tom’s Diner.”

Vega spoke to me by phone about her excitement for the present and her thoughts on what she has accomplished in the past.

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The Arts Fuse: Were the songs on Flying with Angels written a few at a time over the course of the past nine years or during a more concentrated period in recent years?

Suzanne Vega:  I started writing “Last Train to Mariupol” in the spring of 2022, which was when the invasion happened. So that was the first song to get finished. But “Lucinda” was a song that I started probably back in the year 2000. Yeah, so that took 25 years. And then the song “Chambermaid” took me about an hour-and-a-half last October. It came flying out at the end of the process. It surprised everybody. Nobody saw that coming. I was basically combing through all of my notebooks going, “what do I have here that I can write about?” Then whatever stood up and made itself known to me is what came through on the album.

Even though “Lucinda” took 25 years to write, it still feels contemporary because she’s still putting out music. And I started it back then but finished it by reading her autobiography, which I think came out last year. So it still feels very fresh. I’m not writing about old stuff. It’s stuff that’s vibrant right now. I think that her public profile has deepened over the years.

AF: Is there a specific reason why you chose Flying with Angels for the title?

SV: At first I was going to call the album Survival of the Fittest. But then management complained, saying (laughs) “that’s not a good title for a tour.” And I agreed that you don’t want to call a tour that. Then I thought maybe Speaker’s Corner, but management felt that was very abstract and that Flying with Angels was more human and that people could get more of a feeling from that title.

And I have found that you have to be careful what you name an album. On the 99.9F° tour everybody got sick with fevers. And Days of Open Hand, which I meant as a sort of spiritual openness, ended up meaning losing buckets of money. So you don’t want to do that.

AF: “Speaker’s Corner” and “Last Train to Mariupol” are both political songs. Do you feel that you have an obligation as an artist to address such matters?

SV: I am always wary of saying that it’s an obligation. I write as a citizen. I write because I’m moved to write. If I’m moved to write, I’ll write it. You can’t force it. An artist has to write about whatever they’re moved to write. And in this case, since my husband is a trial lawyer and a First Amendment lawyer whose specialty was defending protestors who has suddenly been silenced because of the aftermath of a very bad Covid attack, I guess I probably felt more nudged to speak up about it. It’s part of the natural dialogue in our household to talk about these things, and that started spilling over into the album.

AF: I live in Salem, Massachusetts, so I am particularly interested in why you chose the image of a “Witch” for the song about the suffering that rendered your husband unable to speak?

SV: I was there when my husband underwent this transformation. I was there in the room and I thought, “Oh my god, what’s happening?” We had just had the eclipse around that time, and I remember thinking, “what if we didn’t live in the era that we live in? What if this had happened 250 years ago, before we had all this medical knowledge and technology?” You would think that a witch had put a spell on this man. You would literally think that he had been transformed and that somebody did this to him. Since I wanted a dialogue with someone or something other than just the doctors, I wanted to rail at someone. So I started to have this vision of a witch who had singled him out and done this to him. This gave me a way to express my feelings. It was dialogue with this twist of fate that was sort of personified by this witch.

On a broader level, I like witches. As a child, I felt I was one and I sympathize with the whole idea of witches.

AF: Regarding “Chambermaid,” do most people get the references upon first listen?

SV: Most people get that reference right away if they’ve heard of Bob Dylan or they know the song “I Want You.” In fact, I’ve read some outraged people on the internet who were going, “this is a rip-off Bob Dylan.” But it’s not a rip-off, it’s what you call an homage. It’s like a reinterpretation. I’ve taken one character from his song and done a song from her point of view, which I’m allowed to do. So it sometimes requires a little explanation.

AF: “Rats” is a bit more on the lighthearted side, but it also addresses an at least somewhat serious matter.

SV: Well, rats are pretty serious. They’re also kind of funny. I find them funny and I find the idea of them fighting in the streets to be funny. I left out “Pizza Rat” because I felt that would be too commercial, but all the stories in that song are true. I overheard the story about the Prius in the street at a dinner party, believe it or not. The rat that ran across the ceiling and fell upon the bed, that was a true story from a producer of one of the other albums. We were trading rat stories.

Rats are part of life here in New York, and they’re horrifying and gross, but I felt some kind of humor there. It’s really from the Covid years. There were so few people in the streets that the animals were coming out. So it became this inversion — there’s no people but there are all these rats. And they were taking over the grocery stores, like Barzini’s. It’s like this horror show, but I wanted to do a punk song, and some punk rock songs are hilarious.

AF: What makes guitarist and arranger Gerry Leonard such a great collaborator?

SV: He’s been terrific. I was going through a hard time personally, so when he gave me a little tap about getting together to do some writing, I welcomed it, and that became a little sanctuary. We’d go over to the studio in Long Island City and we’d have cups of tea and a bit of lunch and I’d pour my heart out to him about whatever the latest thing was that was happening. And then we’d sit down and sort of play around with musical ideas and free associate.

I think there was a bit of recklessness in my spirit because of this thing that happened, Covid in general, and the political landscape that we’re in. So I was sort of taking more chances than usual, and he did not flinch at all. I could throw anything at him. When I threw “Love Thief” at him, I thought, “okay, let’s see what he says about this.” (laughs) All I had was the melody and some finger snaps. I had the chorus, which I sang into my phone and I just snapped my fingers. Then I simply said, “take this, and good luck!” And he created a production around that and sent it back to me and I was crowing with delight. I thought, “Oh my god, this is gonna be great.” So we just had a good time.

AF:  In 2021, you declared, “I am actually Luka” in an interview. Have you ever found that song to be difficult to sing or is it cathartic? Or both?

SV: It’s not difficult to sing the song. There’s a reason I put it in the third person. I created a character that I sort of used as my puppet for decades. I did that on purpose because I needed some distance. When the song came out, I think that I did it the right way. I would have been very uncomfortable at that moment in time saying, “I’m Luka.” But now it’s been almost 40 years, 38 years or something, so I feel that it’s more truthful to say, “yes, I am Luka.”

It is still cathartic for me to sing the song. I still feel it very deeply when I sing it. It is as meaningful to me as it is to those people who come to hear that song. I never sing it carelessly. I sing it with appreciation because it connected me to the world. Instead of being an isolated child at home, I managed somehow through that song and “Tom’s Diner” to make this connection to other people in the world, which was kind of an amazing thing. So I’m very grateful.

AF: Are you surprised by how successful and enduring “Tom’s Diner” has proved to be?

SV: Yeah. The irony in that is that it’s a song about being isolated, about being alienated at breakfast. You’re alone and you don’t connect to anything and you can’t even read the newspaper without feeling disconnected. Then there’s like one moment of connection at the end of the song, and then you go to work.

That that song should be the one song that everybody’s like screaming and singing along to and going “duh duh Duh duh,” it’s astonishing. It’s a 180 from the way the song was conceived. But I Iove it. It’s like party time.

AF: DNA’s remix made it a hit in the clubs and led to sampling by several of hip-hop, pop, and rock’s biggest stars.

SV: Exactly. People were dancing to it. So I love the two hits. I take great pleasure and pride in singing them.

(My 2016 interview with Vega is behind a paywall, but can be accessed here. It discusses “Tom’s Diner” in a bit more depth, including how it made her “the mother of the MP3.”)

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Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to The Arts Fuse, Somerville Times, and Beverly Citizen. He has also written for DigBoston, the ARTery, Lynn Happens, the Providence Journal, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and the Columbus Dispatch. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife and seven-year-old twins — Elliot Samuel and Xander Jackson — in Salem, MA.