Suzanne Vega releases Flying With Angels

Ever since Suzanne Vega’s late-80s hits made her synonymous with eloquent, incisive songwriting, she has been fusing reality with the texture of dreams. The New Yorker’s tenth studio album Flying With Angels reinforces this signature synthesis. In 10 poised songs made of earthly emergencies and interior landscapes, of beauty and brutality both, Flying With Angels is a profound testament to dimensions beyond and within: the refuge we seek in imagination, and how it steels us for living.

Flying With Angels is Vega’s first album of new songs in 11 years, if not counting her 2016 record based on her one-woman play about Carson McCullers, or her excellent 2020 live album. In that time Vega’s considerable influence has continued to bloom across a new generation of vanguard artists who remain inspired by her artful narrative songwriting, like Dev Hynes, Caroline Polachek, and Weyes Blood—all born just as Vega was emerging as a leading figure of the ’80s folk revival, as her clear, resonant voice became a radio fixture with hits like “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner.”

Vega worked on Flying With Angels with her longtime music director and guitar player Gerry Leonard, also the album’s producer, at GB’s Juke Joint in Long Island City. They began with Vega’s lucid, inimitable folk rock sound but soon incorporated R&B, punk, prog, and rock. “Any preconceived notion of what I thought this album was going to be went flying out the window,” Vega said of the eclectic but sharply cohesive collection, which showcases her expressive voice and wise lyrics. As Vega and Leonard cast a wide net stylistically, they worked with a tight circle of collaborators on a more condensed timeline than usual, and those limitations worked in the album’s favor. Vega’s songwriting breathes anew on Flying With Angels.

Suspended aloft, the title track is about caregiving. “I felt this sense of being supported by energy in the middle of an emergency... this idea that you’re being born aloft by something stronger than you,” Vega said. Perhaps befitting a song about inner strength, there’s a tinge of Vega’s enduring influence, Laurie Anderson, in her delivery over the impressionistic guitar riff, which she likens to “the steady hum of an engine.”

The politic of Flying With Angels plays out exquisitely, and somberly, in the first song Vega wrote for the album. The spare folk ballad “Last Train From Mariupol” responded to the beginnings of the war in Ukraine, right after the Russians took Mariupol in May of 2022; many of its lyrics came directly from the nightly news. A consummate Manhattanite, Vega also addresses matters close to home. Inspired by the Ramones and modern Irish rock heroes Fontaines DC, the delightfully dissonant “Rats” was released as a 2024 single surrounding the city’s Urban Rat Summit, confronting the rodents who dominated New York’s streets during the pandemic. “They did take over, which was kind of horrible—funny, yet really awful,” she says. “COVID was such a destructive force, and a lot of this album takes place in that landscape.”

Vega contrasts harsh realities with hopeful moments on Flying With Angels. Two tracks reference other songwriters: “Chambermaid” was inspired by a morning of housework and caring for her husband, imagining herself as Bob Dylan’s chambermaid, a character from his Blonde on Blonde song. Vega adapted the character’s world, seeing her as a dreamer with her own ambitions. On the other hand, “Lucinda” is a tribute to Lucinda Williams, a song that Vega started in the '90s after seeing Williams perform, completing it after reading her memoir in 2023.

Flying With Angels showcases Vega’s deep connection to songwriting at 65, exploring themes of conflict, sickness, angels, and dreams, much like her earlier work with "Marlene on the Wall." The album blends reality with a longing to transcend it, asking, “How are we surviving?” The album closes with “Galway,” a haunting Irish folk ballad about reflection and possibility. Though Vega has never been to Galway, the town represents a future yet to be discovered. “The storyteller’s job,” she says, “is to take you somewhere you haven’t been, not just show you what you know.”

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