Readers,
Today Oldster launches a new video interview series, “Late Nite Radio,” in which music journalist Allyson McCabe will interview established musicians—about their current work, about getting older, and about staying in the game as they do.
Allyson’s first subject is 65 year-old singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, who is currently touring with her new record, Flying with Angels, which will be released on May 2nd. I’m a fan, and so I’m excited to share this interview with all of you.
A word about this interview from Allyson McCabe:
A few months ago Sari and I first talked about the possibility of me doing a music interview series. When she proposed doing it over Zoom as an unedited "vodcast" I will admit I experienced a brief moment of panic. If you've ever heard me on the radio, I may sound "live" but the truth is what you hear is edited and produced, and even when it is "live" it's often rehearsed. From a technical perspective, it's further massaged by professional gear and sometimes the invisible hands of a very skilled studio engineer. You never have to hear the stumbles, and you definitely don't have to see me sweating behind the mic—sprezzatura is its own kind of wizardry. But then I thought, Why not do something different and pull back the curtain, especially if my guest is willing to take the same dare? I decided to call this series "Late Nite Radio" because I want to conjure the magic of a late-night conversation when the script falls away and there's a chance to get to something real.
I'm meeting many of my guests for the first time, the minute we connect on Zoom. Others I've met before in a formal interview context, where they've offered insights that have stuck with me.
Suzanne Vega is one of those artists. I love what she says here about pushing past rejection, the value of finding and holding on to people who share your vision, and what it means to be in dialogue (with your influences, contemporaries, and listeners) through music. I feel a little self-conscious about gushing so much about Flying with Angels, a definite no-no when you're a reporter, but the album is honestly vinyl worthy.
Check out “Chambermaid,” a track from Suzanne Vega’s forthcoming record, Flying with Angels:
Allyson McCabe grew up in Philadelphia. Then she taught at Yale for a long time before leaving academia behind to write stories about music, arts, and culture for NPR, The New York Times, Vulture, and more. Her debut book, Why Sinéad O'Connor Matters, won the ASCAP Foundation's Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2024. Her next book (in progress) will take a look back at the music and pop culture of the 80s. She is also in the process of opening a bookstore in Hastings on Hudson, NY. It's a mixtape of all the things she loves and it's called Vanishing Ink. If you're ever in town, stop by and say hello.
Suzanne Vega is one of the foremost songwriters of her generation—and any generation. Having emerged as a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s, Vega scored a string of early career hits such as “Marlene on the Wall,” "Tom's Diner," and "Luka," which led to sold out shows at many of the world's greatest stages, including Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. Since then Vega has continued to pursue her creative path across nine studio albums as well as a residency at New York's Café Carlyle and one-woman play based on the life of the writer Carson McCullers. Produced by her longtime collaborator and guitarist Gerry Leonard, Vega's first full-length album of new music in over a decade, Flying With Angels, is coming out on May 2. She is currently touring throughout North America and Europe, showcasing material from that album as well as performing an evening of career-spanning songs.
Check out the whole Late Nite Radio with Allyson McCabe series.
Check out Suzanne Vega singing the original version of her hit Tom’s Diner a capella (via tomcatgoodby on Instagram):
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Here’s a transcript of the interview:
Allyson McCabe:
Hi, I'm Allyson McCabe, and this is Late Night Radio for Oldster Magazine. This is my interview with Suzanne Vega, who at 65 is touring behind her incredible new album, Flying With Angels.
Actually, as I was preparing to talk with you today, I was really excited and I went back and looked at some of your past interviews and of course your music, but also the collection of your writing was very insightful to me, be able to connect some dots and put them together. And I just wanted to kind of begin with that because I was so moved by something that you wrote in the beginning, in the introduction. You talked about you grew up in Harlem and on the Upper West Side, and in the introduction to the book you said, "This is the story of a child growing up in a hard urban environment. She grows up a little and learns to fight. She leaves her private fantasy world and learns to travel through the real world, the world of cities in the ocean. She confronts the specter of her own death and ends by leaving her cynicism behind, finding hope and freedom by connecting with other people through being as compassionate as possible."
And I was really moved by that. And as I was also then thinking about the lyrics that you wrote in this book and the music that you paired with those poems, many of those turned into songs, I started to think about the idea that how you were able to follow this trajectory towards compassion was, it started by becoming a really keen observer of your own environment and recording it very faithfully. And then I'm wondering for you, at what point were you able to make that turn to expressing that to other people through poetry, through music? Did one come before the other or was it all coupled for you from the start?
Suzanne Vega:
It was coupled for me from the start, but that's also partly because I had parents that were what we would call Bohemian, I guess. My father who raised me was a writer. My mom was a computer systems analyst, but she fell in love with this man who was a writer. And so we were always told to express ourselves. Any kind of artistic expression was encouraged. And I, as a child, spoke late. I was a late talker. Language didn't come easily to me. So through this various forms of encouragement, I started to write when I was pretty young. I started writing when I was about six or seven, write poems and rhyming things. So I sort of wasn't allowed to stay in my own private world. I was forced in some ways to come out of it and interact with the family and then from there, interact with the neighbors, interact with people in school. So it became a ripple effect that now I go out to the world and I exchange my ideas.
Allyson McCabe:
So those early poems, were they something that you mostly kept in a private journal? Did you share them with your family members, with other people outside of your family?
Suzanne Vega:
Oh, those very early poems? Yeah, with everybody. I didn't start a journal until I was 12, and then that became much more private. But those early poems were just like... I thought everybody could just rhyme. I thought everybody [inaudible 00:03:42] poems and rhyming. And when I had my daughter, I realized that wasn't exactly true, she had her own interests. So yeah.
Allyson McCabe:
Did you have any sense from an early age of what your life would look like either personally or professionally?
Suzanne Vega:
I always knew I wanted to be an artist of some kind. I loved the stage. I remember being drawn to the stage at a very young age. I think I was four years old the first time I saw this beautiful wooden stage with a little spotlight on it. And I don't even remember who came into the spotlight, I just remember seeing that spotlight and thinking that's where I want to be. And that was, yeah, I was like four. So what I was going to do in the spotlight, was I going to be a dancer? Was I going to be an actress? Was I going to be a playwright? I wasn't sure what it was. And in my life, I've done all of those things.
Allyson McCabe:
When you were starting out as a musician, you had a series of, I guess you would say day jobs, babysitting, dog walking, camp counselor, etc. How did those gigs inform your songwriting?
Suzanne Vega:
Oh, well, I think it's good to work for a living. I think it's given me a good work ethic, first of all. And secondly, it's helped me as a performer. There was a time in my life when I was working as a receptionist, so I had to greet people. I had to greet them on the phone and I had to greet them when they came into the office. And I also had to deal with any stuff that was going on with the people in the company. It was a very small company, it was like seven people. So if one department was having a problem with another department, I had to be the peacemaker. I also had to make the coffee and serve the coffee if we were having a guest. I learned how to run things from the top to the bottom from that job and how to be a pleasant person and face a public in a sense, small public, but still. So I think it's good to get out there and work and just feel that you're of some use to society, that's a big thing.
Allyson McCabe:
And interacting with people in all these various ways, I mean, did any of those people you encountered later kind of populate your songs as characters or as scenes that you observed or that sort of thing?
Suzanne Vega:
Not specifically, I don't think. Although I'm still great friends with my old boss from that particular...
Allyson McCabe:
When you were a receptionist?
Suzanne Vega:
Where I was a receptionist, yeah.
Allyson McCabe:
I guess it couldn't have been too bad of a job then if you guys are still in touch.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, it wasn't bad at all. I really liked him, he was really smart, and I liked working with him. He had a vision for this company and it was just one of these things. But it hadn't occurred to me to write a song about him. I don't know, but I write about people who work.
Allyson McCabe:
I was thinking about it when I was wondering about that question.
Suzanne Vega:
In the new album, there's a song called Chambermaid. I was thinking of Bob Dylan's chambermaid, and I was sort of... At home, I am always tidying up. I do the dishes, I do all of that stuff. And so I was imagining this woman who was Bob Dylan's chambermaid, the one that he goes to talk to in the song I Want You. And I was thinking, what would that have been like? Just imagine, who is this woman? I imagined her as having her own inner life. She wants to be a writer, but she's cleaning hotel rooms for a living because sometimes you have to do that. So I was interested in this sort of mentor-disciple relationship between this chambermaid and Bob Dylan and how she studies him, and there's a kind of intimacy in trying to get to know his mind. It's not like, are they having an affair? Clearly they're not. But there's this connection, and I liked it that she's a chambermaid, but that she's also a writer.
Allyson McCabe:
And that you're giving her agency and subjectivity at a point of view that you don't necessarily think about when you hear him sing that song.
Suzanne Vega:
Right.
Allyson McCabe:
I think to go back, I definitely want to talk about the new album, but I also want to go back a little bit first and talk about in your earlier career, you were associated with the eighties folk revival, but you never have really let yourself be hemmed in or defined by any particular sound or genre. Before you had those big massive hits, did you encounter resistance from the industry? And were they trying to say, this is where you need to be on the radio or in the record store bin? Was there a sense of what do we do with the person who is not going to be comfortable in the box?
Suzanne Vega:
Yes. I did encounter that, and it was in the form of repeated rejection from all the major labels, basically. Fortunately, I had a manager who really, really believed in my talent, and he also, I'm not sure what, one day I'll have to sit down with him and ask him what made him see this vision for me. I had imagined that I was going to be on a record label like Flying Fish. Maybe I'll sell a hundred thousand. He said, "No, I think you can do it better than that. I think I'm going to get you a major label deal. I think you could go all the way." And I was like, great, what do I have to lose? I had nothing to lose.
So he's the one who saw a bigger future for me. And in the beginning, we were rejected by all the major labels, including A&M Records, who ended up signing me, but they rejected me twice before they actually signed me. So that is a lesson to everybody who wants to make it in the world, don't give up, because if you gave up after the first time, it took three tries, and even then the success was way more than anybody was imagining.
But I also had good management in that they supported me in whatever I wanted to do, whatever sound I wanted, they set up the conditions so that I could do what I wanted.
Allyson McCabe:
Do you think it's easier for artists who are coming up now, emerging artists, maybe because some of those traditional, conventional gatekeepers have kind of fallen away, and the way that people encounter music, the way they interact with it, isn't so much defined by genre, that there's more freedom than there was perhaps at that time?
Suzanne Vega:
Yes. I think that, and a lot of people own their own record labels now. I own my own record label now. So you're not depending on a big company to do the marketing and all that stuff. It's also harder because now there's so much more competition. Every week I hear... I've heard that every week there are just thousands of albums being released. So back then, the channels of distribution were much more narrow. So you could have much more of an impact more quickly. When I made Solitude Standing and Luca went to radio and it was immediately accepted there and became a hit, I sold 500,000 albums in eight weeks, which was astonishing. These days, I think it's harder to have that kind of massive impact unless you're someone like Taylor Swift who's already built up a massive following over decades. So easier in some ways, more difficult in others.
Allyson McCabe:
At this stage of your career, how do you most want to be seen as an artist, and has that changed for you over time from the beginning of your career to where you are now?
Suzanne Vega:
No, no, it hasn't changed. Nothing's changed about how I want to be seen as an artist. I am still in a sense, doing the same thing I did back when I was younger. I play one instrument, and that's the acoustic guitar, but I have great collaborators that I work with. So if I have an idea, like on this new album, there's this song called Love Thief, which is like a Motown R&B song. I couldn't play that on the guitar to save my life, but I know to bounce that over to Jerry Leonard and I can say, "I have this idea, do something with it" and he's able to feed it back to me. So it's always been a question of taking an acoustic instrument and then mixing it with whatever technology is to make it feel modern and to make it feel of the moment. Now trying to do that with every, I'd say every single album. I have the acoustic guitar as the center, and then have whatever else I'm kind of into of the moment.
Allyson McCabe:
So I interviewed you once about, I want to say about 10 years ago for NPR, and at that time you had just started this process of re-recording and re-releasing your back catalog, and as you referred to earlier, part of that was to regain ownership of the songbook. And that was also, we should say, about a decade before Taylor Swift did something similar. But also when you went back and you... Sorry, I'm getting a little bit of a note saying for a brief flip, my AirPods disconnected, but they're back on. Hopefully we didn't lose each other in the connection.
There is a reconsideration, you're not just re-recording it in a kind of random way, but it's really you sitting with those songs, there's such an intimacy to those re-recordings and really a re-imagining of what that catalog is. And I'm just wondering for you, if you could tell me a little bit about what you decided to include and how you approached it, and did it bring you back to the time when those songs were originally written or other times when you performed them? What did it bring up for you, and did it sort of provoke a kind of self re-examination, as you thought back to, oh, wow, this song feels different today than it did at the moment that I wrote it or this moment that I performed it at a certain place or time?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, here's the thing. A lot of the songs that made it onto those recordings, it was about 70 songs, so there were quite a few songs that had fallen away because I didn't perform them or I didn't like them anymore. Those songs, I just let them go. Ones I ended up recording were songs I had been performing through the whole time, so it wasn't like I had to go back. It wasn't like I hadn't played Cracking since 1984. I have. I've played Cracking a lot, so it wasn't like, oh, let me bring myself back to the time when I wrote it.
It was more like a continuation of, here I am, I'm playing with Jerry, I'm going to give the fans an intimate version of the song, mostly unproduced. And also, I loved the engineer we were working with, Joe Blaney. He created a sound that if you listen to it, and especially if you listen to it with ear pods, it really sounds like I'm in the room with you. It's that intimate. There's all the grain of the voice. There's very little effects. I love effects. I mean, I use them all through my recordings, but with this album, I was really thinking of the fan alone in their room, and I'm singing into your ear. That's how close, that's why it's called the Close-Up Series. It's not just like, I'm in your room singing to you. I'm actually in your head.
Allyson McCabe:
It works. That's the thing. The idea is, I think in general, you put out a song, you have your own meaning to the song, your own intention that you have into the song, but then there's the way that the listener interprets it and relates it to their own experience and their own imagination. And then the idea that you could think you know a song, but then you hear it in this stripped down intimate context, even though it's quieter, it's almost louder because that space opens up. I think it's just a fascinating thing to think about, revisiting your earlier work with that idea in mind, this idea of stripping away everything so that the connection between you and the listener is really very direct and very close.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, exactly. It's all about the story of the song, the melody, the guitar work, and that connection. Yeah.
Allyson McCabe:
That may be a good segue to talk about another through line of your work is your deep connection with other artists, whether they're musical artists or an author like Carson McCullers. And this idea of you have that, and then you're sort of also bringing in the listener. So there's a three-way relationship between you, your subject, and the listener taking place. I'm just thinking about this in terms of the idea of being in the room with you as I was listening to the new album, Flying With Angels, which I can honestly say is my favorite Suzanne Vega album, and that's a very high bar. I've just been listening nonstop.
Suzanne Vega:
I'm so glad. Thank you.
Allyson McCabe:
I mean, it's just incredible because, I mean, the first song that I heard before I listened to the full album was Rats, which I think for a lot of people would be unexpected, right? It's fun, but there's so many, I'm listening to it, I'm like, there's whole worlds packed into the song. I hear in the vocals, a little reference maybe to Jim Carroll and in the keyboards, like Steve Naive, and then you've got The Ramones. I know you've talked about your love of Fontaine's DC.
And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about really the brilliance, I'm going to fangirl a little, of putting that on the same album with let's say something like, you mentioned Love Thief, which for me recalls something like Laura Nero's collaboration with LaBelle, maybe, or Galway, which is Irish folk song. They cohere. I would love to talk with you a little bit about thinking about as you're putting together this album, I think when people hear eclectic, they lose that there is a kind of through line that not only makes it cohesive, but makes it yours. And so in terms of your approach to this album, what were some of the things that you were thinking about bringing in, and we know how you were thinking about tying them together in this way that it's clearly definitely a Suzanne Vega album?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. Well, first of all, you always begin an album with some intentions, but honestly, the way putting an album works for me is more like a kind of desperation. I'm like scrabbling around in my grab bag of lyrics, guitar riffs, random melodies, weird stuff I found on my iPhone, stuff I found in my journals, and sort of throwing them all together in a way that I can bring to these writing sessions that I do with Jerry, and then finishing them on time. So the 10 songs that end up on the albums are the ones that I've finished. So it's not like, oh, I'm going to write about life struggles, and then I'm going to write a bunch of songs that reflect this thing. No, it's not like that. It's the other way. It's like, what song is going well? What song can I finish? What do I need to do to get this one a little further?
So I'm usually, and it's true in this case, working right up until the last minute, right until they're mixing and mastering, and they're like, "Suze, you have to finish the lyrics and do the vocal for this other one, because we're finishing the album." So it's a little more like, ah, chaotic desperation. But there is a through line here, and it's always my voice, which is always the same, and I like to think of it as my perspective, the storytelling perspective. There are shifts in the perspectives, but it's generally the same character speaking, if you think of it that way. If you think of each song as a dramatic monologue, there are things that tie the whole thing together. That's the best way I can describe it.
Allyson McCabe:
You mentioned Chambermaid earlier, I guess perhaps in some way an answer song to Bob Dylan's I Want You.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, yeah.
Allyson McCabe:
I'm also thinking about the song Lucinda, if you could talk a little bit about that, because the portrait, and again, this is one of those things where people will have to hear it, even though we can't put it on now, I think if I remember this correctly, I'm sorry if I flubbed it, the first lines is something about Dusty Springfield of the South. Was that the phrase?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, Dusty Springfield of the South. Yeah. That came from a journal entry. I've seen her a few times. I even knew her way back in the eighties when she was hanging out at Folk City, and I was there. In one of my journals, I actually have her address in New York, written in her hand, so we must have been hanging out. So I saw her in the nineties, and I started to write, I wrote that Dusty Springfield of the South, and I wrote down what she was wearing and what her makeup was like, and then I just left it. And recently I read her biography, her autobiography, and I thought, oh, I'd like to finish this song. And when I took it out and looked at it, I realized that everything I had written about her was about how she looked, her style, the makeup she had, her hair, what she was wearing. And after reading her autobiography, I realized there was so much more there, and I thought, I want to flesh this out.
And so I went back to her own work and pulled out phrases, all of those phrases, born preacher, fighter, all of those things are from her own text, how she describes herself. And I liked, the name Lucinda is also a play on words because in a sense, I'm thinking loose, which means light in Spanish, and then cinda, which sort of sounds like cinders to me. So it's like you've got the light and then you've got the dark, the cinders, like the stuff that's there after the fire. And that seems to me to sum up her character in a sense. So I had a good time playing around with that.
Allyson McCabe:
It's a beautiful song. I mean, the portrait is just, I mean, again, I feel bad that we can't play it. People will have to hear it. They must get the album on vinyl. On vinyl.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, we had a good time working on that one. It felt satisfying to finish that one. Yeah.
Allyson McCabe:
Well, I think that's the thing. I mean, for me that is the through line is the idea of really fully fleshed out characters, scenes, like true stories. I think that's probably the element that you pull most out of folk, is the idea of a story in a song. And the song isn't just baby, baby, baby, but you've captured a sense of some emotional truth of the character.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And sometimes it's myself revealing myself through the character, like the Chambermaid character, there are a few things that are very much me. But then there's the Lucinda character, I was really trying to have it be true to her, to who she is.
Allyson McCabe:
Well, that's what I was wondering earlier when I was asking this question about how you want to be seen through the characters and through the work you create. I think in a general way, that's clear, but also you've done many, many interviews over the years. I mean, I'm sure, not to disparage my own profession, but I'm sure you get asked a lot of the same questions often. I mean, are there questions that you wish the journalists would ask you more? Opportunities for you to represent yourself the way you would like to be seen?
Suzanne Vega:
Not really. First of all, people don't always ask the same questions.
Allyson McCabe:
Good. I'm relieved.
Suzanne Vega:
A person will reveal themselves in the questions that they ask me. So it's widely varied depending on who I'm talking to, their age, their sex, whatever, their politics. So I'm never bored by doing interviews. The other thing is that if there's something I want to say, I'll say it. So I don't need the question to come forth with a thought or an opinion. I'm pretty happy with the whole interview process.
Allyson McCabe:
To go back to the song Galway for a moment, the narrator looks back at her life, but she's also looking forward to new possibilities. It got me thinking about possibilities that I look forward to, not necessarily accomplishments, I think when I was a younger person, that's something I would've gone to immediately. Like, I want to do this next. I want to accomplish this, whether it's personal goal or professional goal. But now I think at this stage, I'm more interested in what would, it got me thinking, what would my perfect day look like? And while I don't have all the answers, I think in my case, it'd probably have something to do with music, dogs, the beach and ice cream.
Suzanne Vega:
Sounds good.
Allyson McCabe:
I was going to ask for you, is there a sense at this stage of where you are in your life, in your career, what a perfect day would look like?
Suzanne Vega:
I think so, but I don't know really. I like being on tour. It's a little more taxing now than it used to be, but I still love it. I just have to work my way up. It's like training. So I'm pretty happy on a day when I'm on tour. But yeah, I can imagine a world in where I slow down a little bit. And yes, there would be an ocean, there would be ice cream, maybe a dog or two, depending on if I have someone to share the responsibilities with. A world where I would read more books and write my journals and, I don't know, maybe go back to do some sort of community theater or something like that. Something where I could hang out and pretend to be somebody else. I mean, that's a lot of fun for me. So yeah, I think of that. But I also love touring, so hopefully I can keep doing all of that.
Allyson McCabe:
Well, thank you so much for talking with me today, and I'm very excited about the album and congratulations. And yeah, it's been great talking with you.
Suzanne Vega:
Thank you so much.
Check out the whole Late Nite Radio with Allyson McCabe series.
Thanks for watching and listening! And big thanks to Allyson McCabe. Next up in the series will be Sally Potter. Look for that interview on Thursday, May 15th.
