‘Everything feels very . . . modern, very much of the moment,” Suzanne Vega, considering her new album, “Flying With Angels,” told The Star last week, “even though most of the songs were started at least two years ago, if not more.”
Among the new offerings is the leadoff track, “Speakers’ Corner.” “I started that a couple of years ago,” she said, “not expecting it would be even more relevant right now.”
“The speakers’ corner, there it stands / In politics and song,” she sings. “I guess we better use it now / Before we find it gone.”
The artist, marking 40 years since her debut album, will return to the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Friday, June 13, at 7 p.m.
Perhaps best known for the enduring hits “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” from her breakthrough album, 1987’s “Solitude Standing,” Ms. Vega, who owns a house in Amagansett, is in the midst of a tour of the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, having recently completed dates in the Midwest. The tour continues to Europe in the fall.
“Flying With Angels,” an eminently likable and stylistically diverse collection that incorporates folk, R&B, and rock-and-roll, is her first album of new songs in 11 years, not counting the 2016 release “Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening With Carson McCullers,” from her 2011 one-woman show about McCullers’s life and work, and 2020’s “An Evening of New York Songs and Stories,” a live album from a series of performances at the Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan.
“Flying With Angels” is indeed topical, the Covid-19 pandemic among the events informing its themes, just as it did her life in a firsthand manner: Her husband, a spoken-word poet and First Amendment lawyer, had recently recovered from a bout with the virus when he suffered two strokes that left him nonverbal and having to relearn to speak. “That happened right at the end of the Covid years,” she said. “We had been really good about keeping Covid away from my husband, and then when he finally did get it, it hit him hard.”
“Witch” is an observation of a man rendered unable to speak by a witch. “Rats,” which comes closer to punk rock than one is accustomed to hearing from Ms. Vega, considers the rodents’ pervasiveness in New York City during the pandemic.
Other standout tracks include “Chambermaid,” in which she channels Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” while imagining she is the artist’s chambermaid amid real-life caring for her husband, “Last Train From Mariupol,” composed early in Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, and “Lucinda,” her ode to Lucinda Williams that is a pitch-perfect rendering of that artist’s roots-rock aesthetic.
“ ‘Lucinda’ took the longest to write,” Ms. Vega said. “I started that close to 25 years ago — I saw her in a performance in Denver and wrote the first couple of verses. Then, I think it was last year or the year before, I read her autobiography [“Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir”] and thought, ‘Let me get that song out and finish it up.’ I used a lot of her own phrases from her book that she uses to describe herself.”
Forty-plus years into a hugely successful career, the Manhattan native still loves her work. “It’s really great fun,” she said. “Being on a stage and performing to a live audience is where I’m very happy,” including the stage at the intimate Stephen Talkhouse, where memories of performances — her own and others’ — abound.
“I remember the first time I went there as a spectator,” she said. “I went there for a show, New Year’s Eve of 1990, and saw Eric Burdon. I was so impressed, because up until that moment I thought Stephen Talkhouse was the corner neighborhood bar, and didn’t realize it was this world-class venue. It had pictures of Marianne Faithfull and all these people, and I thought, maybe one day I’ll play there. . . . I’ve played there many, many times. I have great memories there, I’ve seen great shows there, and am very happy to be associated with it.”
Early reaction to “Flying With Angels,” which was produced by Ms. Vega’s longtime music director and guitarist, Gerry Leonard, has been positive. “It’s been really well received,” she said, “and I’m really happy about that. It had been a long time since I’d made an album of all-new original songs that didn’t have to do with a play or something. I’ve been thrilled by how it’s been received. We’re going to have a lot of fun doing the new songs.”
It’s a praiseworthy continuation of a career that took off with “Solitude Standing” and an unlikely hit that fuses irresistibly catchy pop with the heartbreaking narrative of an abused child. “I didn’t mean for it to be that way,” she said of “Luka.” “I thought I was just writing a straightforward, matter-of-fact song about a child in a bad situation. I didn’t hear that it was catchy or anything like that. My manager was the one who decided that it could be a hit, and I was very doubtful. But he was correct. It’s good to have a good manager who can figure out these things.”
