Suzanne Vega’s Impressionistic Snapshot of a Moment in Time: ‘Flying With Angels’

With her hit-making career stretching back into the 1980s, Suzanne Vega will introduce some of her new songs as well as classics such as “Luka,” “Marlena on the Wall” and “Tom’s Diner” at a concert at Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Friday, June 13. The New York-based singer, who has summered in Sag Harbor and Amagansett, returns to her familiar performance space where she’s been often — in the crowd as well as onstage.

Starting as a neo-folk singer in Greenwich Village’s Fast Folk scene in the early 1980s, Vega has written her share of literate, insightful and poignant songs that have catapulted her into the rarified realm of vanguard artistry. She eloquently observes the inner and outward conflicts she faces as a foremost storyteller with wise lyrics and expressive voice.

Like her mentor and friend, the late Lou Reed, at times she digs deep into the New York urban landscape. She’s attentive to the struggling sphere of the world where the seen meets the unseen, the spoken meets the unspoken.

Vega expresses that fully on her eclectic new recording, “Flying With Angels,” released on May 2, the same day as her self-titled debut in 1985. Her wide range of songs include a free-speech rage about social ills, a charged adaptation and reworking of the Bob Dylan hit tune “I Want You,” a shout-out celebration to alt-country singer Lucinda Williams, the smooth-grooved love song “Love Thief,” the folksy “Last Train from Mariupol” about the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The album also includes the gritty and humorous Ramones-inspired “Rats,” and the eerie “Witch,” a chilling metaphor of the COVID-19 effects on her husband Paul Mills (aka spoken-word activist Poez the Poet) who suffered two strokes which affected his ability to speak. She says this album’s theme “comes from an atmosphere of struggle.”

This is her first studio recording in 11 years since 2014’s “Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles,” which was then her first album in seven years.

In a conversation with Vega on the eve of the release of “Flying With Angels,” she said she hasn’t been on the sidelines. In fact she had gravitated to the theater for her one-woman play about a Southern gothic author, “Carson McCullers Talks About Love.”

“There was the 2014 album, and then two years after that I recorded the soundtrack to the play ‘Lover, Beloved, Songs From an Evening with Carson McCullers,’” she said. “And then I did nine months of touring and I recorded a live album in 2020. So, between all that, I was busy. I wasn’t just hanging out.”

Then COVID-19 arrived and the world shut down. But Vega boldly responded with music, featuring her song “Rats,” the first advance single of the album.

“COVID hit New York City bad,” she said. “It was such a destructive force here. We’re still living in the aftermath while the rat population grew and now dominates the city. I grew up in East Harlem, so I know about rats in the streets. But I started hearing stories from people of their encounters with rats, and I started reading the newspaper to take more notes.

“I began writing the song in 2023, and then felt like it deserved a punk rock delivery in line with the Ramones and the Irish rockers Fontaines DC,” she continued. “My longtime collaborator and producer Gerry Leonard, who played with David Bowie, made that happen.”

Vega finished the song in 2024 with the whimsical warning chorus:

“Rats are on the warpath/Rats are on parade/Come and see them running through/

The apocalypse manmade/

Welcome to this urban life/Welcome to my city/Survival of the fittest/Is never very pretty”

She read in the newspaper about the city’s inaugural National Urban Rat Summit.

“I got excited,” she said. “This is the perfect song. It didn’t get much notice because that was when the Mayor Adams indictment was all over the news. But I went and played the song. Everyone loved it and said, ‘Wow, she’s back.’”

In an interesting twist, Vega sings the poetic open letter “Lucinda” to outlaw alt-country star Lucinda Williams with the chorus: “Two sides has Lucinda/At the very least/She’s a kind of angel/Sometimes a beast.”

“I’m very fond of her,” Vega said. “I wouldn’t say we are friends. We’re acquaintances. We’ve met from time to time. I met her in the ’80s and ’90s, and, I still meet her as our paths cross from time to time. I started this song in the early 2000s, and I thought it’s probably time to finish it because it’s been 25 years, which is crazy. I’ve heard from someone on Facebook who told me that he played the song for Lucinda and that she was knocked out. I haven’t heard from her directly yet, but he said she was very happy to hear that.”

“Flying With Angels” opens with the profound and resonating “Speaker’s Corner” about the decay of free speech. Hopefully she’ll sing this powerful tune at Stephen Talkhouse on June 13. She talked about its history in her songbook.

“Interestingly, the weird thing is that I wrote that song two years ago,” she said. “I honestly hoped that by the time the song came out that it would not be needed. But instead, today it’s needed more. What I’m doing here is describing where my personal world and the political world intersect. You know, there’s this figure who can’t speak, so that’s clearly my husband, who’s had to learn to speak again. Yeah. He’s in the first and the second verses.”

Vega speaks to the abuse of the notion of free speech. “You’ve got the politicians and people who are using the speaker’s corner, who can speak, and who are using it for saying the wrong things, who are promoting lies, propaganda — using principles as a means to get cash for themselves, promising certain things and doing other things,” Vega said. “In a sense, this song is an impressionistic snapshot of a moment in time. What I mean to say is in the final line: ‘The Speaker’s Corner, there it stands in politics and song/I guess we better use it now before we find it gone.’

“That works for everybody, not just one party, but because that’s what America is based on. The idea that you have free speech and that you can use it responsibly in an educated way, in the most basic sense of the word, to use it for truth, not for ridiculous nonsense.”

Could the song be a political anthem of protest?

“It’s a fine line going on there,” Vega said. “What’s going on now is not the same as the ’60s. People weren’t hiding their faces and masking themselves while protesting. They stood up and they spoke freely to the press. They barricaded themselves in because they wanted to stop the war. So I think there’s a difference in the protests that happened back then and that are happening now.

“I think if everyone was genuinely protesting peacefully, there probably wouldn’t be a clamping down on it. This is my feeling. But I’m not there on campus. I’m at other protests.”

Suzanne Vega performs on Friday, June 13, at 7 p.m. Visit stephentalkhouse.com for details. The Stephen Talkhouse is at 161 Main Street in Amagansett.