Suzanne Vega after Covid: ‘A very tempestuous time to be alive’

Folk-rock luminary Suzanne Vega, now 66, has just released her first album in eleven years, Flying with Angels.

New York has yet to recover from the Covid lockdowns, she tells RNZ’s Sunday Mornings.

Singer/songerwriter Suzanne Vega performs at RNZ’s Auckland studio, Tuesday 7th Auckland 2018

RNZ/Luke McPake

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“So that’s one of the things going on. I mean, the other is that there’s a lot of political strife right now in America, no matter which side you’re on.

“It’s a very tempestuous time to be alive and here right now, more so than usual.”

One song on Flying with Angels ‘Rats’ is far from metaphoric, she says.

“The rats are everywhere…they are actual rats. And they did, in fact, eat up the backseat of the Prius. All of those little anecdotes that I say in the song were things that I either heard verbatim or read in the newspaper or saw with my own eyes or heard or got firsthand from other people.”

As a child of 1960s activist parents, she was, by the time the 1980s arrived, skeptical about whether songs could change anything for the better, she says.

“I guess I felt a bit disillusioned, which led me to have an argument with my manager when he approached me in the ‘80s and said, that song that you have about ‘Luka’, that’s a song about an issue, and I think it could be a hit.

“I was like, why? I told him, I don’t think music really changes anything. He got very upset with me and he said, no, no, we did change things in the ‘70s. Music helped to change the atmosphere of the culture and it helped to end the Vietnam War.”

Nevertheless, she agreed to record what would become one her most famous songs.

“I said, if you really believe that, yeah, let’s work on a production and we’ll see what happens, and he was correct, and so I was humbled by the success and by what happened because I was skeptical.”

Her 1980s hit song, ‘Tom’s Diner’, has been covered, remixed and sampled by more than 50 artists. She puts its success down to its simplicity

“First of all, the melody, it’s gets into your head and it stays there. Secondly, the idea of the song, of sitting in a diner with a cup of coffee and looking around. I don’t think there’s a culture in this world that doesn’t have a place where you go to and drink something hot and look at other people.

“I think that it’s a very human thing to do. So, everyone sees it and they can make it into either their own diner or their own situation.”

Vega grew up in Harlem in the 1970s, the New York of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

“I remember seeing it when I was 16 years old. And I was only four years older than the 12 year old Jodie Foster. And I thought, this is it. This is New York City right now. This is my life. This is how we live. These are the problems of New York right now.”

It was in many ways a grim era, she says.

“It’s a nightmare. I mean, it’s apocalyptic. But that’s what it felt like in the 1970s.

“It was very hard to be a young girl in the ‘70s. I think it was different if you were the older generation.”

Suzanne Vega will be in New Zealand in September 2026 to perform three career-spanning shows.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand