Suzanne Vega - The folksinger who defied loneliness

“She's the most personal, forceful and complete singer-songwriter of recent years,” the New York Times proclaimed at the time of her debut. And no prophecy ever proved more accurate, because it was indeed Suzanne Nadine Vega who anticipated the rebirth of female songwriting across the Atlantic, paving the way for the generation of Tori Amos, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Germano, Fiona Apple, Ani DiFranco, Alanis Morissette. Even though the Californian artist has always had to battle the resistance and prejudice of a music business already reluctant to give women their due, let alone a songwriter who made sobriety and discretion her trademark. An anti-diva by choice, in other words. “If you keep a low profile you can last longer, even if you don't end up in the papers – she told us with a hint of satisfaction during a phone conversation – My role model is Leonard Cohen: have you ever seen him drunk or dressed outrageously? And yet he's fantastic”. Words spoken with the same grace and poise she brings to her performances.

At the Greenwich Village funfair

Born in Santa Monica in 1959, Suzanne moved to New York as a child, the New York inhabited by folksingers and mythologized as a new Babylon by Lou Reed.

She spent time in the Hispanic community, listened to South American music and studied dance at the High School of Performing Arts. She then graduated in English from Columbia University. Her passion for music – which she nurtured by writing songs from the age of fourteen – led her toward the Greenwich Village folk circuit. And it was a Lou Reed concert in 1979 that struck her like lightning, setting her on the path to rock: “It was the first time I'd seen an artist tackle subjects like violence and despair with such courage. I realized I could write songs about outsiders, about people on the street, that I could become a folksinger”. And it was with minimalist lyrics, grafted onto delicate musical textures, that Suzanne showed up to her first auditions. “It was horrible – she told us – Sometimes you'd play in front of some guy eating a pork chop and drinking a beer, and at the end he'd just say: No thanks”.

When young Suzanne took her first steps in the legendary Greenwich Village, what appeared before her was - more than a forgotten world - a playground of memories and echoes of the past, almost a wonderful hallucination, the ideal habitat for the poems she secretly wrote while still in school. She was only twelve when none other than Pete Seeger invited her onstage for her very first concert ever. From there her fame, reputation and success grew exponentially, until she became a sensation throughout the neighborhood, one of its most sought-after performers. She even got to record her first demos for the "Fast Folk" magazines curated by the veteran singer-songwriter and folk devotee Jack Hardy, whose circulation extended well beyond the genre's borders.

The right people fall in love with her. Her acoustic technique, which elevates and modernizes that of Joni Mitchell, but even more her understated, humble, almost breathless and absent vocal delivery, let the clear talent of the young Vega shine through to a seasoned rock hand like Lenny Kaye and to Nancy Jeffries of A&M. The new round of demos from 1984 is only a confirmation: Kaye studies the right tonal blends to pair with her stories, and the musicians to employ accordingly (actually an impressive array, given the girl's rapid rise). The result is a perfection of spontaneity, all captured on the first, self-titled long-playing record finally released in 1985, a debut that sings of metropolitan flatness with the sweetest apathy, and that would prove influential even in styles and genres bordering on the new folk-rock, a small, quiet revolution. The style is highly personal: a faint voice, often whispered, short phrases: "I had asthma for a long time, I couldn't breathe and hold long notes," she would later reveal.

The whispered opening of “Cracking” (the close of “Neighborhood Girls” is its mirror image, but an unusually vibrant and sustained piece of southern-funk) sets the overall tone of Suzanne Vega (1985) with the greatest of ease, in a twilight music-box melody that brushes against Tibetan stillness while sinking into desolation. What follows are little musical poems with homespun, amateurish arrangements, more hostage to her obsessions than to any real musicality: the leaden, sighing “Small Blue Thing,” underscored by childlike electronic sounds but also by synths that stretch out the sorrow, is in fact a singable stream of consciousness, as if Vega had haphazardly staged her own imaginary psychoanalysis session. “Oggi mi sento una piccola cosa triste/ come un marmo/ come un occhio…/ Sono persa dentro la tua tasca/ sono persa contro le tue dita”, she sings in lyrics steeped in sorrow and suffering. "I still feel it, but only sometimes – she would tell us – The thing is, sadness pushes me more to write. When I'm happy, on the other hand, I'd rather do something else. Like go dancing or go shopping."

Even more subliminal, impossible and mute is "Freeze Tag", entrusted almost entirely to the soft jingling of the acoustic guitar. The same goes for the refrain of "Knight Moves", a gem worthy of a baroque cantata that stirs up shivers of desolation, perhaps the quietest track here in its strangled flamenco touches. So too "Undertow", with chords sketched out in the darkness of a bedroom, granting only scant room to the dramatic choral swell of a chorus that fades out almost immediately, as if afraid to disturb the monotony in which it's set.

Perhaps a bit too on-the-nose in its narrative-metaphorical intent is “The Queen And The Soldier” (though it does seem to foreshadow the Celtic storylines of Loreena McKennitt). Above everything, though, two obsessively repeated, breathless chants stand out: a glacial, invocatory “Some Journey,” led by a vocal that seems to vanish into its own words, into its own questions and into the dark corners of her soul, and above all “Marlene On The Wall,” a folk-rock masterpiece of imploded emotion that caresses a vision at once mythological and melancholic: “Marlene watches from the wall/ Her mocking smile says it all/ She records the rise and fall/ Of every soldier passing/ But the only soldier now is me/ I’m fighting things I cannot see/ I think it’s called my destiny/ That I am changing”. The idea behind the lyrics has nothing to do with more famous “walls,” referring instead – as she herself jokingly explained – to a “more anonymous wall,” the wall of her childhood bedroom, where as a girl she kept a photo of Marlene Dietrich pinned up.

Suzanne Vega remains a classic of intimate female songwriting. Its introverted strength and its atmospheric magic stem from a shrewd fusion of its components: a dreamlike voice, lyrics that are dark yet delivered as if in a fairy tale, sounds that are at once technological and chamber-like, moving touches. A rarefied synthesis of two clashing anxieties – the yearning for emancipation of the Seventies and the urban unease of the Nineties – it foreshadows, unwittingly but not entirely so, a new generation of singer-songwriters. Remarkable too is the understated, tightly-reined mise en place of the session musicians (and producers: above all the great Kaye), to whom Vega seems to actually transmit her own melancholy; only on Darol Anger's dizzying electric violin at the close of “Some Journey” does a burst of enthusiasm slip through.

Cementing her success is an important collaboration with Joe Jackson on another elegant ballad, “Left Of Center,” included on the soundtrack of the film “Pretty In Pink” (1986).

“I am Luka”

The once-shy girl from New York's folk clubs, in short, managed to make her mark, to assert a strong personality, though one seemingly hidden within the folds of her shyness and reserve. But it was her second album, Solitude Standing (1987), that would turn her into a global star, thanks to a greater openness to pop and to its two hit singles. “Luka,” in particular, became a worldwide sensation, its graceful folk-pop guitar dress concealing a harrowing story of domestic violence against a child. A slow, inexorable descent into hell that begins in confiding tones (“My name is Luka, I live on the second floor, I live above you, yes, I think you've seen me before”) only to soon turn into a desperate flight toward solitude as the only way out of fear (“E se chiedete ecco cosa dirò/ che non è affare vostro comunque/ Penso che mi piacerebbe stare da solo/ Con niente di rotto”). “Luka” sprang from a doubly autobiographical idea: “A few years ago, I used to see this group of kids playing in front of my building, and there was one of them, named Luka, who seemed a bit different from the others – Vega would recount – In the song, Luka is an abused child; in real life I don't think he was, I think he was just different.” But in our conversation, the American artist would also reveal that she drew in part on her own painful childhood: “I hid behind this imaginary character to tell the nightmare of child abuse, which I lived through myself as a little girl. Yes, it's true, Luka is me.” Suzanne's childhood was difficult in many respects: at age 9 she discovered that the Puerto Rican writer Ed Vega, with whom she lived alongside her mother in New York, was only her adoptive father. “It was a shock, I had to re-examine my identity: I liked the idea of being half Puerto Rican, and instead, suddenly, I found out I was one hundred percent white,” she also told us. “Luka” would become “song of the year” in the United States and remains one of her biggest hits. In Italy it was also translated into a cover version by Paola Turci.

The other knockout blow is “Tom's Diner,” a driving a cappella track set during breakfast at Tom's Restaurant on 112th Street and Broadway, which would later be remixed by two British dance music producers under the name DNA and would even be used as a reference track in a trial of the Mp3 compression system. A song with which Suzanne revealed to the world her versatility as a performer: no longer just a sober, shy acoustic folksinger, but also a fully-fledged chanteuse, at ease humming this tender page of a metropolitan diary like a nursery rhyme.

But even in her sophomore effort, the Santa Monica singer-songwriter doesn't abandon the underlying sobriety of her approach. Few embellishments and bare arrangements: just some keyboard flourishes to add richness to “Luka,” plus a slight rhythmic pulse to animate the title track (an unsettling reflection on solitude, forever lurking like a specter) as well as “In The Eye” and “Wooden Horse.” But on the whole, acoustic guitars take center stage, serving Suzanne's faint, graceful timbre, from the hypnotic “Ironbound/Fancy Poultry” to the romantic “Gypsy,” from the hypnotic nocturnal visions of “Night Vision” to the more radiant “Language,” which ironically muses on the emptiness of words. The tracklist also includes the resurrection of a song Suzanne had recorded in her late teens, the ethereal fairy tale “Calypso.”

For the American singer-songwriter, it's another full-on success, even if it perhaps lacks a worthy heir to the magical “Marlene On The Wall.” Solitude Standing would reach number two on the Official Albums Chart and number 11 on the Billboard 200. Not bad for a small blue thing.

By the late Eighties, Suzanne Vega had cemented her reputation as an accomplished folksinger with flawless concerts across America and Europe, always opened by “Tom's Diner.” She graced magazine covers and broke hearts: music magazines, initially reluctant to give too much space to that shy, pale anti-diva in black gloves immortalized on the cover of Solitude Standing, were won over by the bold charm of an artist who displayed an incredible clarity of vision and purpose. This included turning down a certain New York jet set that, in those years, courted her all the same: “No parties, I don't see many people. The other day, though, I saw Lou Reed, he's always a fun guy,” she told us, again around that time. And regarding her adopted city, New York, she painted a two-sided portrait: “It's become a city full of anger and violence, it pains me; but the cultural life is always very stimulating.”

The new objects of desire

The new decade of the Nineties opens with Days Of Open Hand (1990), its cover unsettling and mysterious, with Suzanne emerging from a frame against a black background, strange hands surrounding her.

After two albums with a strong impact (the first more folk, the second more pop), the Californian singer-songwriter loses a bit of immediacy along the way, taking refuge in a much denser and more structured sound, with more dreamlike but also darker, shadowier atmospheres, making room for unprecedented synthesizers.

There's no shortage, though, of top-class melodic openings, like that of the opening “Tired Of Sleeping,” which tells of a child's yearning to be born over a soft blanket of mandolins and guitars. Equally engaging is the playful nursery-rhyme feel of “Book Of Dreams,” which marks perhaps the happiest, most spirited moment on an album otherwise dominated by a rather bleak, pessimistic mood, even when the tempo picks up into more driving rock passages (the mournful “Men In A War,” a metaphor for war's maimed).

The more electric tracks, like "Rusted Pipe", with its organ harmonies and jangling percussion, and the dreamlike "Big Space", revisit the synthetic ideas of its celebrated predecessor, but without fully convincing.

Better, if anything, are the sparer, acoustic tracks, like the visionary litany of "Predictions", the dreamy "Institution Green" – a bitter reflection on an increasingly alienated and materialistic society – the paranoid "Those Whole Girls", with its obsessively repeated lines over relentless arpeggios fading out into emptiness, and the passion-drunk litany of "Room Off The Street", set to the rhythm of Latin guitars, flutes and gypsy percussion. These songs form the spiritual heart of the album, later distilled into the Eastern-tinged aromas and existentialist verses of the closing "Pilgrimage". But the dramatic climax probably lies in the chilling lines of "Fifty-Fifty Chance", a snapshot of an attempted suicide hung on the taut strings of a cello and a melancholy violin, right up to that unsettling final question: “Will she try it again?”.

A bold record, still steeped in class and personality, but not blessed with hits or potential ones, and at times even a little unresolved in its tension between drama and enchantment, Days Of Open Hand would fail to repeat the success of the two albums that preceded it, marking a stumble in the rise of the singer-songwriter from Santa Monica.

Aware that she'd made her sound a bit too dark, Vega changes register drastically on the following 99.9 F° (1992), which above all flaunts what its unfortunate predecessor lacked: a vibrant, memorable single. That would be the gorgeous ballad "In Liverpool", another superb example of folk-pop magically intoned by Suzanne for a melancholy little portrait of a Sunday Liverpool, with no traffic on the road and a faint, thin light, just like the person the American singer-songwriter is addressing ("one of my first boyfriends", as she herself has admitted). Blessed with a moving melodic opening, "In Liverpool" takes its place in the pantheon of her most intense and touching songs, able to pierce the heart with the barest of frills.

But that's not all, because the intrepid Suzanne also has a small sonic revolution up her sleeve, filed under the hybrid label "folktronica", yet capable of venturing to within a few steps of industrial. A successful manifesto of this is the opening of "Rock In This Pocket", with Suzanne's subtle, splendid vocal timbre wrapped in thick layers of synth and marked by drumming beats in the background. A blend of folk spirit and synthetic dress that recurs in the electronic noise of "Blood Makes Noise", amid rubbery, powerful basslines, and in the driving title track, where the harmonic sweetness of the vocal lines marries electric jolts and scratchy guitar riffs.

Then, though, there's all the acoustic grace of Vega the folksinger, ready to resurface with her load of lumps in the throat and held-back tears, in intimate moments like the shadowy "Bad Wisdom", the contrite "Blood Sings" and the closing "Song Of Sand", suspended entirely on a thin thread of guitar arpeggios and bloodless vocals, with distant gusts of violin heightening the pathos.

The first chapter of her collaboration with producer and partner Mitchell Froom, whom she would marry shortly after the album's release, 99.9 F° is another act of courage from an artist determined not to stay confined to her comfort zone, capable of shaping her style across a range of different, distant sonorities without losing the intimate core of her music and, above all, its soul.

Among the Nine Objects Of Desire (1996) of the following work, there are also two adolescent passions never quite extinguished: bossa nova and jazz. More generally, under Froom's skillful guidance, Vega continues to explore and experiment with more structured musical territories, even if the boldness of its predecessor is toned down, with the almost total disappearance (except perhaps for the techno-rock of "Casual Match") of those quasi-industrial rhythms and metallic samples that surfaced at the temperature of 99.9 F°. What remains, though, are the layered keyboards, the obsessive percussion and the sophisticated arrangements, shaped around Suzanne's ever-delicate, sinuous vocals.

The feat is called "Caramel", an elegant, seductive samba in the style of Astrud Gilberto, lit up by a new, radiant melodic opening. Also evocative and poignant is the closing act of "My Favourite Plum", with Vega as a delightful muse, fully at ease amid sinuous weaves of strings, guitars and vintage organ, steeped in melancholy.

But the genre hybridizations continue with the elegant, jazzy pop of "Thin Man", the bossa-nova/funk blend of "Stockings" and the dark groove of "Headshots", concealing yet another sorrowful reflection on past mistakes. Because Vega has never stopped looking inward, reflecting in the mirror, with her always subtle and sharp way with words, as the biting "World Before Columbus" attests (“If your love were taken from me/ Every color would be black and white/ It would be as flat as the world before Columbus/ That’s the day that I lose half my sight”).

The folk vignette worth framing, meanwhile, goes this time by the name of "Honeymoon Suite", a forceful nod back to the roots from which it all sprang, with Suzanne's evocative delivery resting on a soft acoustic guitar arpeggio.

With her Nine Objects Of Desire, in short, Suzanne Vega presents herself as a mature, refined chanteuse, certainly more eclectic than in her early days, and in some ways more at peace – her marriage to Froom having given her a daughter, Ruby. Her artistic journey has also become intertwined with a sincere spiritual search. A Buddhist for several years now, she told us she no longer takes part in the rituals as she once did: “But at home I still keep my little altar; the only problem is that now, between the incense bowl and the candles, there are Ruby's seven dwarves figurines!”.

Suzanne Vega can thus look back and trace her career through her already numerous hits, gathered on the anthology Tried And True (1998), enhanced by an appealing new unreleased track, "Book & A Cover", with her soft voice warning against the dangers of judging too readily by appearances (“What’s that they tell you/ About a book & a cover?/ Don’t judge so quickly/ They’ll tell you one thing and then another”). In the meantime, she also launches a parallel career as a writer, starting with "The Passionate Eye", a book of stories, poems and unpublished songs, translated into Italian as “Solitude Standing” by Valerio Piccolo for Minimum Fax.

Red and Grey

Suspended between the melancholy of Laura Nyro and the austere elegance of Joni Mitchell, Suzanne La Dolce thus charts a new path that will allow all the guitar-toting girls of that era to break out of their cocoon and imagine a future of success. It's no accident, then, to see her presiding a few years later like a godmother over the stage of the Lilith Fair, the triumphant all-female traveling tour devised by Sarah McLachlan. Because that whole phenomenon, more or less consciously, had its roots precisely in the early ballads strummed on guitar by the girl who kept Marlene's photo in her bedroom. “We didn't think we'd be so successful, it was fantastic. Credit goes above all to Sarah, who created a welcoming atmosphere and had the insight to donate part of the proceeds to charity in support of women's rights”, she commented.

Despite her success, though, the Vega persona remains an enigma. No gossip, no eccentricity has ever touched the life of this one-of-a-kind rockstar. "And yet my life is very strange – she reveals with a touch of pride – it's just that nobody knows it. I'm private, but not shy, and I feel more like a writer than a rockstar." Indeed, songwriting is her true passion: "A lot of the time songs start out as dreams, and I jot them down without thinking. And then later I find I can't remember what I meant," she admits candidly.

The end of the Nineties is marked by painful days of distance and separation. First and foremost, Vega's divorce from her husband, Mitchell Froom, which leaves an indelible mark on Songs In Red And Gray (2001). "He was always away for work, we just couldn't hold our relationship together. It's sad, but career mattered more than our bond," she'll admit, "but only a few songs on the album are actually about Mitchell." Yet within the music, the emotions are palpable: "I hope women going through a divorce will find some relief in listening to these songs: despite the subject matter, they're not melancholy."

But Songs In Red And Gray is an album of farewells, including on an artistic level. It would in fact be the final chapter of her long partnership with A&M Records, the label that had believed strongly in her and had released her albums since 1983.

Produced by Rupert Hine, who had previously worked alongside Tina Turner, the album attempts to bring Suzanne Vega back to her folksinger roots with a handful of sober, reflective songs: "These are acoustic pieces with very emphatic lyrics. They recall the style of my early records, but they're more direct, more personal, more emotional," explained the Santa Monica-born singer-songwriter. The album's title fuses opposite extremes: "Red symbolizes passion, the heart; gray symbolizes reason. Red evokes youth, gray evokes maturity." And the thirteen tracks move through contrasting states of mind: melancholy, hope, anguish, anger.

So we move from the aching sense of loss in "Harbor Song" and "Widow's Walk" to the proud j'accuse of "Machine Ballerina", from the dark torments of "Soap And Water" and "Penitent" to the innocent grace of "Priscilla". The closing, haunting ballad "St. Claire" is perhaps the record's finest moment. But overall, the result is rather flat. Suzanne Vega's songwriting can still be refined and elegant, but the more "restless" soul of her music has completely disappeared.

The sound of Songs In Red And Gray, as a result, is a gentle, sugar-coated pop, clean and inoffensive, thin and ultimately sterile. The modernist touches, courtesy of synthesizers and electronic rhythmic pulses incapable of sparking real emotion, only add confusion and disorientation.

Meanwhile, in 2003, the compilation Retrospective: The Best of Suzanne Vega was released (the UK edition includes a bonus CD, while the deluxe edition in the "Sound & Vision" series comes with a DVD featuring some of her music videos plus an extra CD with as many as twenty songs).

Six years after her last, disappointing studio album, Vega returns with Beauty & Crime (2007), marking the start of her new partnership with Blue Note Records. It's "a mosaic of small stories about New York, based on things people told me or things I saw or sensed," the singer-songwriter explains. In short, it's her own "New York Stories" or her own "Night And Day", if we want to compare her to two extraordinary chroniclers of "New York-ness" like Woody Allen and Joe Jackson.

Though by now so far removed from the frontwoman archetypes in vogue in the 2000s, America's anti-diva still manages to seduce with her hushed confessions, as in the sinuous bossa nova of "Pornographer's Dream", which immortalizes an elusive, sexy muse (“Lei è il sogno di un pornografo, disse/ so cosa intendeva/ ma mi fece immaginare: che genere di sogno potrebbe fare, che non sia ancora stato consumato?”).

There's no shortage of the usual autobiographical sketches, always heartfelt and sincere, like the intense "Ludlow Street" (in memory of her brother Tim, a graphic designer who died at thirty-seven), in which her acoustic pop takes on jazzy shades, or the achingly sweet lullaby "As You Are Now", dedicated to her daughter Ruby, and the affectionate confidences to her new husband in "Bound" (“Tutte queste parole/ come tesoro/ e angelo e caro/ affollano la mia bocca/ sulla strada al tuo orecchio”). These are small pieces of pop craftsmanship, far from transcendental, but always marked by that elegance which has never faltered, even in her murkier moments.

Then there's the tribute to the Big Apple, sketched through sensual portraits ("New York Is A Woman") or glimpses of post-9/11 desolation ("Angel's Doorway", which immortalizes a policeman with his clothes wrapped in "a cloud of dust, filth and destruction"). With a gallery of characters, both real and present, like her New York graffiti-writer friend in "Zephyr And I", or belonging to a mythic past, like writer Edith Wharton, celebrated through delicate fingerpicking on "Edith Wharton's Figurines", and like lovers Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, to whom the apocryphal dialogue of "Frank & Ava" is dedicated, with its catchy hook and irreverent lyrics ("On the way to the bidet / Is when the trouble used to start").

All very polite and well-mannered, but without any particular jolts. Even the potentially disruptive contribution of Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) gets anesthetized within this elegant, black-and-white New York frame, where the tempo rarely picks up ("Unbound", "Zephyr And I"), but never enough to make us jump. Suzanne Vega confirms herself as a sensitive, classy artist, but without the melodic grace of the days when she sang of Marlene, Luka and Liverpool, always feeling like a "small blue thing".

Between reissues and literature

In 2010 the American singer-songwriter revisits her career in acoustic form across the four-volume Close-Up series, thematic collections drawing from her seven albums: Love Songs (2010), People & Places (2010), States Of Being (2011) and Songs Of Family (2012).

This serves as the prelude to her eighth album, Tales From The Realm Of The Queen Of Pentacles (2014), her first in seven years, a comeback record packed with illustrious guests but weighed down by a superficial, self-indulgent eclecticism ("Fool's Complaint", "Jacob And The Angel", even a stab at grunge on "I Never Wear White" and a hip-hop sample on "Don't Uncorck"), which seems mostly intent on chasing easy approval from younger generations. The two lead singles both flop badly, "Don't Uncorck What You Can't Contain" with its chart-chasing Middle Eastern-flavored production, and "Fool's Complaint" with its blatant radio-friendly packaging, light years away from the class of "Luka" and "Left Of Center".

However far and wide Vega roams, the banjo-driven "Crack In The Wall" risks sounding as anonymous as any Nashville pop singer, "Portrait Of The Knight Of Wands" draws rather too closely on the Eagles' "Hotel California", and "Jacob And The Angel" is an unlikeable little parabiblical tale in the vein of late-period Rickie Lee Jones. Traces of symbolic arrangements and her finest narrative sensibility surface instead in "Song Of The Stoic" (even if her adult-contemporary style applied to the age of recession really doesn't work), but then the near gospel-medley of "Laying On Of Hands/Stoic 2", more a feat of production than of songwriting, goes off the rails. In the end Vega only truly finds herself again in the understated, almost church-like delivery of "Silver Bridge", a sign that the singer-songwriter really can't do much more than repeat herself.

Her theatrical debut with "Carson McCullers Talks About Love" (2011), with which Vega pays tribute to the American writer whose gift for hidden emotions amplified in everyday life she shares, evolves into Lover Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers (2016), again in collaboration with Duncan Sheik, who had already helped her put the piece together.

At first it seems like a retro record for a bored retiree, though it's a vintage sound consistent with the musical climate McCullers moved in, from the piano-bar scat of "Carson's Blues" (worthwhile mainly for its bandoneon and trombone solos), to the lulling cocktail-jazz of "New York Is My Destination", and a decent display of rhythm'n'blues shape-shifting on "The Ballad Of Miss Amelia".

Fortunately there are also numbers worthy of her best past work, where Vega moves from surface homage to a deeper analysis, as if probing the writer's portrait as a mirror image of her own soul. The pianistic "Annemarie" could teach Cat Power something about loneliness, "Lover, Beloved" is a little gem of sensual discretion, and "Carson's Last Supper" is a feat of introspection worthy of Lisa Germano. And "12 Mortal Men", barely more than sighed, is actually a difficult, even acrobatic vocal tour de force, given her usually understated standards.

Next comes the live album An Evening Of New York Songs And Stories (2020), a refined theatrical "recital" steeped in New York City, weaving together songs, stories and tributes, such as the one to the master Lou Reed with a cover of "Walk On The Wild Side".

Forty years after her debut and nine years on from her previous studio work, Suzanne Vega returns with her chiming guitar and gentle voice, to tell us slices of lived life and stories of an everyday existence suspended between reality and imagination. The ten tracks of Flying With Angels (2025) – produced by Gerry Leonard, longtime collaborator and guitarist who has also worked alongside David Bowie – move between urban chaos, political tensions and dreamlike visions, exploring themes such as the struggle for survival, freedom of expression and the search for spirituality.

The album opens with a fine folk-rock blow that, between jangle guitars and sharp lyrics, draws on the metaphor of "Speakers' Corner" – the spot reserved for impromptu public speakers – to warn of the dangers of disinformation and restrictions on free speech, all too relevant in the age of social media and Donald Trump's America: "I guess we better use it now/ Before we find it gone". A sense of political urgency and rock verve return in "Witch", the story of a modern-day curse, symbolic of the gratuitous injustices afflicting society, driven by hypnotic guitars that keep the tension high after the fairy-tale intro. "Rats" even reveals an unexpected punk streak, with distorted guitars and a garage-rock organ backing a fierce critique of survival of the fittest: a commendable attempt, even if not quite Suzanne's natural territory.

The tragic state of the world today resurfaces in the mournful "Last Train From Mariupol", which delicately tackles the subject of the war in Ukraine, between a bandura-style guitar and ethereal voices, including that of Vega's daughter, Ruby Froom.

Of course there's no shortage of her typical acoustic, guitar-led soliloquies, like the title track, which between hazy arpeggios whispers hopes of some saving intervention in difficult times, the delicate tale of lost love in the ballad "Galway", echoing Irish folk traditions thanks also to Leonard's co-writing, and the more driven "Chambermaid", a semi-cover that reworks Bob Dylan's eternal "I Want You" from a feminist angle, giving voice to the chambermaid mentioned in the original song. Also firmly within her comfort zone is the elegant "Alley", built on a web of minor-key guitars and propelled by an urgent drum rhythm, leaving the stage to the more measured, intimate side of Suzanne.

Enriching Vega's classic sonic palette are the blue-eyed soul inflections of the delightful "Love Thief", with an enveloping bassline and '70s-style R&B harmonies that support Suzanne's calm voice, counterpointed by the sinuous vocals of Catherine Russell, making it one of the album's high points. Less convincing, though heartfelt, is the dedication to Lucinda Williams ("Lucinda"), which blends acoustic sketches, spoken word and electronic loops to celebrate one of the icons of American female singer-songwriting.

Flying With Angels won't be the album that relaunches Suzanne Vega's career – already more than satisfying as it is – but in just 38 minutes (a far from negative trait) it gives us another pleasant dose of her graceful, sharp-witted songwriting, reminding us that in an age of aspiring girls with guitars, there's still someone who can teach them all a thing or two about the craft.

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