Album: Suzanne Vega - Flying With Angels

Wow, can it really be 40 years since Solitude Standing, the second studio album by Suzanne Vega who put the 1980s folk revival on the map. “Fast folk” the New York scene was called, and its voices emerged from much the same Greenwich Village cafes which were the proving ground for the 1960s revival that introduced Bob Dylan to the world.

Plus some newer ones, notably the Cornelia Street Café, founded in 1977 and run by a Brit named Robin Hirsch until absurd rents forced its closure just a few years ago. The album Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange honoured the weekly gatherings when singer-songwriters came together to try out new songs in front of their peers.

I was transfixed by Vega’s Late Show performance and the next day went off to buy the album (remember those days, CDs the new-fangled technology?) which gave the world a hit single (“Luka”) about child abuse. Solitude Standing went platinum and remains the most successful of her 10 studio and five live albums.

Flying With Angels is her first all-original album in over a decade and the mysteriously titled Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles. It’s actually rather a doozy – clever, intricate, uniquely stylised, and very New York. Produced by long-time collaborator Gerry Leonard, whose distinctive guitar style is everywhere evident, the album’s 10 songs run the gamut of musical styles: from alt-folk to alt-rock plus a dash of soul-funk, from the exquisitely gentle to the raging and angry and all of course delivered in that trademark sprechgesang style redolent of two of Vega’s idols, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed.

Unlike Dylan from whom we’ve not heard a peep about society’s manifold ills these past few decades, Vega engages with the some of the unimaginable local and universal trials and tribulations of contemporary life. At a time when it is everyday threatened, “Speakers Corner” is a paean to free speech, while the poignant title track is a song about caregiving. “Lucinda”, a song started in the 1990s and finally finished after Vega read her recent autobiography, offers “an admiring look at Lucinda Williams”. “Rats”, appropriately discordant and grungy – it could have come straight out of the glory days of punk – engages with one of the more unpleasant aspects of New York City life. It’s followed by “Galway” a gentle, lilting song telling “a little true story of the one that might have been”. Two worlds colliding.

The album’s two standouts are very different: “Chambermaid”, a “reimagining” of Dylan’s 1966 classic “I Want You” from Blonde on Blonde – a pastiche which borrows the same rhythms and riffs and vocal melody, the story retold from the point of view of the chambermaid, here recast as an aspiring songwriter in whose dreams Dylan offers advice and encouragement: Those who know the canon will spot the deftly crafted lyrics endlessly referencing the original song.

“Last Train from Mariupol” dates from 2022, the early days of the Russia – Ukraine when the city of Mariupol was under siege, causing a crisis described by the Red Cross as “apocalyptic” and forcing citizens to crowd on trains in a bid to escape the carnage. I was in fact privileged to hear the first-ever performance of the song, when Vega appeared at my festival, The Village Trip, in September 2022: you could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the Players Theater, Greenwich Village. The song begins quietly, just singer and acoustic guitar somehow conveying a feeling of utter despair and desolation. Then keyboards, martial-style percussion, and Leonard’s angry electric enter, then drop away as the song draws to a close. Guernica in four short verses. Ruby Froom, Vega’s daughter, adds affecting background vocals. A deeply moving and understated miniature and alone worth the price of entry.

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