Suzanne Vega: "People are speaking out, but not enough"

Going into my interview with Suzanne Vega, I had one goal: not to bring up ‘Tom’s Diner’.After all, I figured she’d been asked about that seminal a cappella track roughly a million times since its 1987 release.

I failed.

In my defence, how could I not ask? It’s been spun by DJs from Berlin to Bangkok and still pulses through clubs across the globe every weekend in one form or another.

“I feel amazed,” she laughs. “I thought of it as a small song, a kind of film. The thing that people have grabbed onto is the melody and the rhythm, which I took for granted when I was walking down the street and heard the melody in my mind.

“You know, it’s stuck in my mind too, the way it sticks in other people’s minds.”

Du du durah du dururah du dah durah da duraruh…

The reason I’ve been invited into the world of “The Mother of the MP3” (‘Tom’s Diner’ was the song chosen to test the first digital compressions for the MP3 format) is not to discuss ‘Tom’s Diner’, but to talk about the recent release of Suzanne Vega’s new album Flying With Angels, her 10th album, featuring her first new material since 2014.

Sitting among stacks of books in her New York City apartment, the folk-pop legend is wearing glasses and exudes a quiet, thoughtful energy.

“We worked on the album for over two years, and it’s just great to feel that it’s done and out in the world. What a relief!” she says.

When I ask about the songwriting process, Vega instantly name-checks her longtime collaborator Gerry Leonard, the Dublin-born guitarist who also worked with David Bowie.

“We had this ritual where I’d come in, and Gerry would make me a cup of tea or two, and I’d pour my heart out about everything that was going on,” she says with a smile. “Then we’d have lunch and some more tea. That would be two hours into the session, and then we’d start fooling around with writing ideas.

“Gerry kept a spreadsheet: here’s the title of the track, here are the references. We were referencing everything and anything – Trent Reznor, this band, that band, the other band, soul music, hip-hop.”

Not all tracks came from meticulous planning, though. ‘Chambermaid’, for example, was born from a lyric in Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’.

“I woke up with this idea from a dream: ‘I’m Bob Dylan’s chambermaid’. I don’t remember what the dream actually was, but I had the sense that I had seen him and spoken to him,” she says matter-of-factly. “So I thought, well, there’s a nice rabbithole to go down. I got up, made a cup of tea, got the guitar and it took me about an hour-and-a-half to write the whole thing.”

Vega’s music tastes range far and wide. She references everything from Silk Sonic (Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak) to Fontaines D.C.

The latter, of course, piques my interest. I ask her to expand.

“Two years ago while on tour, we were on a huge Fontaines D.C. kick,” she enthuses. “We were listening to them in the car, then in the hotel room afterwards – just really loving the writing and the music.”

The Dublin band ended up directly influencing the creation of the folk-infused-with-post-punk track ‘Rats’.

“When we were working on it, we had this chunky sort of rhythm going, based on ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ by the Ramones,’ and I said, I wanted an angular, descending thing, kind of like Fontaines’ ‘Televised Mind’, and so Gerry whipped off this thing. That was meant to be an homage to that guitar riff.”

The resemblance is so clear that at a live show in Chicago, someone in the crowd shouted out the exact track.

“They actually knew Fontaines D.C. well enough to know which song we had appropriated. We didn’t steal the line, but it was so obvious that even people from the audience were shouting it out.”

The Fontaines aren’t the only Irish influence on Vega’s most recent record. One of the album’s most wistful tracks is ‘Galway’, a love letter to a city Vega has still never visited.

“At one point I played a festival 15 minutes away from Galway, like way out in a field, and it poured rain. And then we went back to Dublin, so I never actually made it to Galway.”

The song was inspired by an old admirer who once invited her on a romantic getaway there.

“I said no, but the young man kept reappearing in my life, exactly like in the song,” she says. “When I divorced my first husband, I started to think back on choices and… Hmm! You know that romantic trip to Galway sounds pretty good about now,” she laughs. “So Galway is this kind of mystic place that recedes in the horizon in my life, but I’m not trying to stir up trouble!”

A 2026 Irish tour is “whispered about,” she teases. “I’m so excited to come to Ireland – Hot Press should come cover it!”

Amid its sonic variety, Flying With Angels still showcases Vega’s bread and butter: theatrical, narrative-rich lyrics. ‘Speaker’s Corner’ feels as though it was written amid the current political chaos.

“All those full of wind and air / Screaming out distorted facts.” Remind you of anyone in particular?

The song was penned in 2021, during a difficult chapter in Vega’s personal life. Her husband, poet and former trial lawyer, Paul Mills, suffered several strokes after a severe bout of Covid.

“He was a trial lawyer who defended protesters’ free speech,” says Vega. “For that to happen at this moment in time just seemed so ironic, that it probably pushed me to be more vocal about these things than I might have been otherwise.”

The “state of permanent emergency” described in the song reflected both pandemic anxiety and Mills’ health. But, as Vega admits, it’s since taken on new meaning in the Trump era.

“I couldn’t have foreseen that,” she says. “But it’s why I’m more vocal now. People are speaking out, but not enough. The protests are great and I think we need more of them. For a while, we were having them regularly, and there was always a new one on the horizon. I’m a little concerned now, because I’m like, where’s the next one? I want to see it on the calendar.

“You have to be active,” she adds. “Because otherwise you just start to slump down into despair.”

Back to the record, Vega remains grounded in the slow-burning art of storytelling, something increasingly at odds with today’s scroll-and-skip culture.

“I think intentional listening probably has decreased,” she reflects. “When I first started trying to get gigs in the ‘70s, it was already the wane of the singer-songwriter movement. We were getting a lot of punk rock and new wave – fast, edgy – everything changing like that.

“But I think there are also people who live slowly, who don’t participate in all the fast fashion and fast music and fast this and that – it all depends on how you live your life. People are still growing as slowly as they ever did.”

The Grammy-winner tells me she practises Buddhism as a form of prayer twice a day.

“I process things very slowly, especially emotionally,” she says. “I sort of bring the audience into my world, which takes time.”

She credits her thoughtful lyrical focus to childhood puppet shows she’d put on for her siblings (“Mom needed a distraction”) and a college course called Dramatic Monologue.

“They’d throw apples at me while I sang,” she laughs. “But it taught me a lot, I love slipping into characters.”

Unsurprisingly, Vega’s two most famous songs, ‘Luka’ and ‘Tom’s Diner’, are both sung from the perspective of a male character.

Any songs she writes and then decides not to release?

“It happens all the time,” she responds. “Those are called private songs. I have a little stash of private songs, things that I wrote, maybe tried them out once or twice, got a horrified response from the audience. Then, okay, that goes in the vault.”

I ask what advice she’d give to a young Suzanne who has just shot to global fame. She takes a long pause.

“Gosh! Well, I think I had a hunch back then that it wasn’t going to continue at that level for the rest of my life, and I was correct in that. So I think I would tell her: do what you love. Don’t be afraid to take chances. That’s the way I’ve lived my career.”

As for the endless remixes of ‘Tom’s Diner’ – how does it make her feel, that a short melody which came to her while walking one afternoon almost four decades ago will live on throughout time?

“It’s out there in the universe now,” she smiles, “everyone’s playing with it and I give it my blessing.”

Flying With Angels is out now.