Suzanne Vega ProfileFew places on earth have been mythologised as thoroughly as New York City. Its residents and buildings, its parks and squares long ago passed into legend, yet no one has looked at them quite the way Suzanne Vega has. Even her idol, Lou Reed, could never resist putting himself into his songs about the city.
Vega has always preferred to stand back and watch. She is unhurried, too. Where Reed released dozens of albums of varying quality, Vega works at a pace that speaks to severe quality control, and four decades of that patience have earned her an audience that will follow her anywhere. Tonight she has brought Flying With Angels, her first album in a decade. She begins, naturally, at home.
"Please welcome to the stage, from New York City, Suzanne Vega," intones a voice. On she comes with guitarist Gerry Leonard, both waving, both reaching for their instruments. Leonard once played beside David Bowie and Laurie Anderson, and all night he is the ideal foil: layered, textured, quietly inventive.
He reshapes the landmark songs of the 80s and the new ones with the same unfussy flair. Vega puts on a top hat and opens with Marlene on the Wall. Anyone who has spent the week cramming her records will notice that the voice is reedier now, more muted than it was 40 years ago, but that doesn’t really matter. For a woman so thoroughly shaped by her adopted city, it sounds like exactly the right amount of inhaled grit and lends the songs an intimacy they never had.
When she arrived in the mid-1980s, Vega was known for two things: an uncanny control of her instrument and a cool, observational distance. She watched strangers through a diner window and heard them through her apartment ceiling. Her characters were on a journey, or as Calypso, she sang of keeping Odysseus from his. Forty years on, with a new album to play, that distance has thawed. She is warm, welcoming, audibly liberated. "You know old songs. We know old songs. We're made for each other," she says, and she revisits them with obvious joy.
Gypsy, from her 1987 album Solitude Standing, began as a poem she wrote at 18 while working as a counsellor at a summer camp, where she fell for the arts and crafts counsellor, a boy from Liverpool. The romance lasted six weeks. She sent him the poem, and he sent her a bandanna. Vega and Leonard give it a gorgeous reading and follow it with the sweetly lilting Caramel.
Then they welcome cellist Stephanie Winters for The Queen and the Soldier, a song that still sounds as if it were copied out of an illuminated manuscript. In Canberra, Vega delightedly confesses she swapped two of its verses and gave her characters a new story for the first time.
Having drawn us in with the familiar, she turns to the new, but first she shares the news from Washington. The US president had banned two news services from the White House. The rest walked out in solidarity, leaving Donald Trump to unveil a new helipad without any audio. "No one could hear anything he was saying," Vega says, smiling, her arms outstretched. The audience cheers.
From an artist famous for observing, such a direct response to current events is a rare thing to hear. Flying With Angels is about New York under COVID lockdowns, extreme weather and a tide of disinformation that has splintered communities that once lived side by side.
Speakers' Corner is unambiguous in its message to tell your truth while there is still someone to hear it. Chambermaid is sung by the chambermaid whom Bob Dylan mentions in passing in 1965's I Want You. Vega leans heavily into his arrangement and uses it to turn his song inside out with a freshness that suggests that she is still a lightning rod for new ideas.
Then comes Dylan himself. They were touring Scandinavia together, she tells us. He paid her a compliment, she stole a kiss, and they never saw each other again. "But," she adds, "if he wants to, he can find me…" The audience cheers, recognising the chorus of Left of Center. Leonard layers his guitar parts into something close to hard rock, a dense backdrop for Vega's acoustic guitar and Winters' bowing.
The trio close the set with Some Journey, the tender ballad from her debut album, now given the same muscular treatment. Then comes a spacious Luka, and a Tom's Diner that owes a good deal to DNA's dance remix, an interpretation Vega described at the time as “charming”. Vega paces the stage, top hat back on, black suit flapping, while Leonard plays percussive guitar and the room supplies the "duh-duh-duh-duh" hook. Everyone is on board. Everyone, briefly, is back in the late 80s.
They return for an encore of Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, a song no one else wanted to play at a tribute concert after his death. Her affection for Reed, and her debt to him, are plain. Still, it is odd to hear her sing about his characters. Reed was in those back rooms. Vega sounds as though she glanced through the window once, turned the scene over in her mind, and delivered a chaste impression in a poetic couplet.
As the cheering that follows her tribute fades, we return to the boyfriend from Gypsy in the form of her song In Liverpool. The boy with the bandanna, we learn, got in touch with her after recognising himself while listening to a BBC broadcast of hers. He got in touch, and they’re now friends she exchanges emails with. Finally, answering a request shouted earlier in the night, they play Blood Makes Noise, which draws the focus back to Leonard's psychedelic guitar textures and Winters' gritty cello lines. Vega smiles, waves and leaves the stage.
Soon a long line snakes away from the merch table, and the crowd spills happily out into the cool evening. All is not right with the world. For a while, though, it seems a little brighter.
