Born on 11 July: Suzanne Vega has always found the words to say it

The American singer has been distilling her poetic folk-rock since 1985 and has just released a new album, Flying With Angels.

Although she was born in Santa Monica (California) in 1959, Suzanne Vega is the embodiment of New York. And even more so the Greenwich Village district, even if for many years it has been in Europe that the public has supported her most fervently...

As a teenager, she began practising rhymes and wrote her first poems. Logically, she began studying modern dance at the New York High School of Performing Arts. But the call of words remained the strongest. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English literature.

One thing led to another and she began performing in the clubs of Greenwich Village, notably the Cornelia Street Café. She played there for the last time on 1 July 2019, when the venue stopped welcoming artists to its microscopic stage.

From the moment she released her eponymous debut album in 1985, the singer invited us to follow her down a meandering, introspective path. Without really knowing why, some of her choruses such as ‘Marlebe On The Wall’ and ‘Neighborhood Girls’ evoke the world of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Like Vermeer, she prefers quality to quantity. And she sprinkles her not-so-innocent tales with seemingly innocuous details and even almost subliminal messages, such as the superb ‘Luka's’ depicting domestic violence against a child. With tact and modesty, without ever raising your voice. But what power!

Over the last ten years or so, she has dipped her pen in the inkwell less often, but she continues to perform on European stages, sometimes surrounded by a band, sometimes accompanied only by her guitar. Her penultimate studio album, Lover, Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers, dates from 2016 and is a blend of 30s jazz and blue atmospheres. The singer invites us to follow in the footsteps of the writer of ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’, who died in 1967.

She never shies away from off-the-beaten-track experiences. In November 2022, in the sumptuous Bozar hall in Brussels (Belgium), with the Collegium Vocale Gent and the Ictus ensemble, she took on the role of narrator for a reworked version of Philip Glass's ‘Einstein On The Beach’. And just recently, in “Flying With Angels”, with its sometimes soul (“Love Thief”) and sometimes new-wave (with the horribly funny “Rats”) accents, she proves that she has lost none of her talent for poetic observation. On “Last Train To Mariupol”, with all her usual finesse, she clearly takes the side of the Ukrainians against the unjustifiable imperialism of the bloodthirsty Putin.

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

New album: Flying With Angels - Cooking Vinyl - 2025

Upcoming concerts:

30 September: Carré - Amsterdam (Netherlands)

2 October: Nieuwe Luxor - Rotterdam (Netherlands)

10 October: Bozar - Brussels (Belgium)

12 October: Koningin Elizabeth Zaal - Antwerp (Belgium)

13 October: Rockhal - Esch-sur-Alzette (Grand Duchy)

Photo : Suzanne Vega devant la porte de sa loge avant un concert au Vooruit de Gand (Belgique) le 22 avril 1986