EBRU YILDIZ
SUZANNE VEGA
Suzanne Vega emerged from New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene more than four decades ago with a distinctive style, and remains one of music’s most powerful storytellers, illuminating the complexities of life with haunting melodies and poetic imagery. Her 2025 album Flying With Angels finds her as compelling as ever, exploring both personal and political issues with songs that are intimate, observant and often unsettling.
Vega has embraced elements of rock, jazz, electronic music and experimental pop in her music. Her breakthrough 1987 album Solitude Standing introduced two of her most enduring songs, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” to an international audience. Few performers move me as deeply as Vega does; “Luka,” her song about child abuse, still brings me to a full stop.
Vega will bring her Flying With Angels Tour to The Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, Oct. 30, and The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, Nov. 6, performing with her longtime guitarist Gerry Leonard, who produced the Flying With Angels album, and cellist Stephanie Winters.
Among the album’s standouts are the imaginative title track (listen below), “Chambermaid,” “Alley” and “Last Train From Mariupol” a song that confronts the devastation of war. In “Lucinda,” Vega pays tribute to Lucinda Williams, the singer-songwriter who, like her, creates unflinching portraits of difficult subjects with striking imagery and emotional clarity.
In a recent interview that John Hammond and I conducted with Vega for our “Inside the Outpost” podcast (I am the Outpost’s co-president, John is its talent booker and head of promotion and marketing), she described the origin of the album’s imaginative title track. (you can listen to the entire podcast below)
“I woke up in the morning and I suddenly had this command,” Vega said. A voice told her to write a song called “Flying With Angels.”
Her first response was resistance. “That’s really corny,” she remembers saying to herself. “I don’t write that kind of song. That sounds like a country/western song.”
But the voice returned with a more specific instruction: “Write a song that Suzanne Vega would write called ‘Flying With Angels.’ ”
GEORGE HOLZ
SUZANNE VEGA
The song grew out of her experiences caring for family members. Her mother has struggled with Parkinson’s disease, and her husband had a serious reaction to COVID. During an emergency, she said, “you’re suddenly heightened and you kind of feel like you’re looking at things from above as opposed to the normal street level perspective.”
“Alley” includes a reference to Marc Chagall and the lyrics remind me of his “Green Violinist” painting. The song also touches on a childhood memory: Vega recalls being chased by a family dog named Pandora, falling and knocking out a front tooth. When the ASPCA came to take the dog away, her uncle called the person who arrived “an angel from heaven.”
As a small child, Vega pictured angels descending alleyways in green jackets to rescue children from dangerous dogs. Years later, that image helped her complete a song she had struggled to write. She came to see it as an image of “transcending earthly suffering.”
We also talked about Vega’s remarkable ability to express emotion through images and metaphors — like in her song “Left of Center. “If you want me, you can find me left of center,” she sings, expressing her nonconformity as well as her desire to be seen.
“Sometimes if I expressed emotions, my emotions sometimes appear to me in a physical form as an image,” she said. “And then I express what that image is. And usually, it is a metaphor for the thing that I am feeling.”
Her father once told her she had a gift for metaphor; that helped her understand the way her mind worked. “I think Temple Grandin called it ‘thinking in picture,’ ” she said. “I am one of those people who think that way.”
That gift is apparent in “Lucinda.” Vega recalled knowing Williams casually from the New York folk scene in the early 1980s. She first wrote descriptive verses after seeing Williams perform in 2002, but the song took shape later, after Vega read Williams’ memoir. “Now I had this window into who she actually was from the inside,” said Vega, adding that she blended phrases from the autobiography with her earlier observations of Williams’ hair, makeup and stage presence to create a fuller portrait.
The cover of Suzanne Vega’s 1987 “Tom’s Diner” single.
New York remains another central element in Vega’s work. On the podcast, we discussed “Rats” (a song inspired by her experiences during the pandemic) and how the city that shaped her has continued to change. “Every decade had its flavor,” she said, remembering the New York of her childhood in the 1960s, her teenage years in the ’70s and her early career in the ’80s.
She stayed in the city during the pandemic, when, she said, it felt “scary” and “deserted.” Now, she sees lingering economic damage but also renewed energy in its streets.
“It has its areas of vibrancy … people are marching down Fifth Avenue, especially in front of Trump Towers,” she said. “So there’s a lot going on.”
Perhaps the most moving part of our conversation came when I asked which of her older songs still resonate most deeply for her. “I still feel ‘Luka’ down to my bones,” she said. “When I sing it, I always sing it completely committed. I’m never walking through it.”
She knows that someone in the audience may have traveled a long distance to hear it, but the connection is personal, too. “I am that girl. I am that child. I am still that person,” she said. “I made a character to sing through but the emotion is still within me.”
The cover of Suzanne Vega’s 1987 album, “Solitude Standing.”
She added that “Luka” is not a song she can perform casually. “It’s a song that I do with my whole heart.”
She usually performs “Tom’s Diner” right after “Luka.” “We always have to have a moment of transition to go to ‘Tom’s Diner’ because it’s hard for some people to let (‘Luka’) go,” she said. “Once or twice, I’ve had a moment where someone’s been triggered by the song ‘Luka’ and I’ll be doing ‘Tom’s Diner’ and I’ll suddenly see this face at the stage by someone who wants to talk to me about what they experienced, and then we’ve had to have a little intervention.”
That enduring emotional connection helps explain Vega’s place in popular music. What makes her particularly compelling is her refusal to conform to expectations: In an industry that often seeks to define and reshape women’s voices, she has remained true to her artistic vision. Her restrained vocal delivery, vivid metaphors and ability to reveal profound truths through seemingly ordinary details have become her unmistakable signature.
Suzanne Vega will perform at The Outpost in the Burbs at The First Congregational Church in Montclair, Oct. 30 at 8 p.m. (visit outpostintheburbs.org); and at The McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. (visit mccarter.org). For more about her, visit suzannevega.com.
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