Suzanne Vega goes above and beyond the wreckage on Flying With Angels, looking towards something bigger, like angels, dreams, and the desperate need to transcend brutal reality.
For nearly four decades, Suzanne Vega has spun everyday realities into something shimmering, sharp, and surreal. Now, on Flying With Angels, her first full album of new songs in over a decade, the New York folk poet once again shows she’s operating on a different wavelength than the rest of us.
Recorded with longtime friend and guitarist Gerry Leonard (David Bowie, Rufus Wainwright) at GB’s Juke Joint in Long Island City, Flying With Angels is Vega's tenth studio album, and it’s a potent one. Mixing folk, R&B, punk, and even a little prog, Vega summons ten songs that wrestle with survival, memory, and the positive side of a stubborn spirit. “Each song on the album takes place in an atmosphere of struggle,” Vega says. “Struggle to survive, to speak, to win, to help someone else - or just to live.”
That tension pulses through the lead single “Speakers’ Corner,” a breezy, California highway tune hiding a grim warning about truth and accountability in the age of social media. Inspired partly by her husband’s fight to regain speech after two strokes, the song has that special touch of folding the personal into the political. Vega’s knack for storytelling remains razor-sharp. “Chambermaid” imagines a side character from Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” stepping into the spotlight, a dreamer trapped in the cycle of housework and longing for something more. Meanwhile, “Lucinda” offers a fierce, decades-in-the-making tribute to Lucinda Williams, another great American songwriter.
But Vega doesn’t just look inward. Flying With Angels is riddled with snapshots of a world cracked wide open. “Last Train From Mariupol” quietly devastates, a spare ballad drawn straight from the horrors of the war in Ukraine. Closer to home, “Rats,” with its scrappy punk energy and dissonant chords, confronts New York’s pandemic-era rat infestation with dark humor and a grim sense of place. Still, there’s light here too. At 65, she’s writing songs that feel lived-in but never jaded, clear-eyed but still looking up. Flying With Angels is a vital dispatch from one of America’s most eloquent survivors. In a world that feels more broken by the day, Vega offers what she always has - songs that wound, heal, but ultimately lift you up.