Suzanne Vega: ‘We need to get back to a place where the facts and truth matter'

Telegraph

02-05-2025

As the eldest of four children, at age six, Suzanne Vega used to look after her baby brother while her mother took her middle siblings out shopping for groceries at stores local to the family home on the East Side of Manhattan. On such occasions, she'd receive warnings of the dangers posed by the city's most tenacious residents. 'Don't let the rats bite Timmy,' her mum would tell her. Okay, but how? The answer came, by making as much noise as was humanly possible.
'I would spend 20-minutes stamping my feet and shouting 'Go away!' or something like that,' Vega tells me. 'I didn't want any of them to come out and bite me or my brother.' With a measure of hesitation, I ask if the family were poor. 'I think if we had had options we would have lived elsewhere, most likely,' is her answer. 'But we were always under the poverty line. I personally was under the poverty line until I was the age of 24, when I got my record deal.'
Now 65, Suzanne Vega still lives in Manhattan, albeit in improved circumstances. Presently on the stump for her sparkling new album, Flying With Angels, her first for nine years, today she's speaking from her home on Madison Avenue – she declines to say on which section, exactly – a well-heeled thoroughfare that runs north to south up the middle of the island.
With its two-way traffic, the road is a pain in the pipe to cross, but a nice place on which to live. 'Actually,' she says, 'my apartment is cheaper than when I lived on the West Side so that kind of worked out nicely.'
Despite carrying the faint air of a governess at an upscale school for bright girls at the turn of the last century, during our 40-minute interview, Suzanne Vega provides engaging company. She laughs easily and, in perfect sentences, seems willing to engage with whatever question is thrown her away.
I can imagine her as an Ivy League graduate working at a high-end Midtown publisher, or as the owner of a fashionable eatery down in Tribeca. Strangely, though, the context in which I find it difficult to frame her is someone who the world knew first as a pretty major league pop star.
In the 1980s, Suzanne Vega's urbane inscrutability stood in marked contrast to the show-all American pop stars clogging the charts. The austere yet impossibly catchy Marlene on the Wall, from 1985's titular debut LP, helped propel her into the public eye. Two years later, Luka, a song about child abuse (would you believe) saw her second album, Solitude Standing, make its way into the homes of more than five million listeners. Strangely, somehow, its acapella opening track, Tom's Diner, has been covered, remixed or sampled by more than 50 artists, including Giorgio Moroder (with Britney Spears on vocals), Public Enemy, Fall Out Boy, 2Pac and Lil' Kim.
'I had all this chart success very early on in my career, which I was not expecting, but that I accepted and enjoyed up to a point,' Vega tells me. 'I went sailing past [my expectations] almost immediately. When I first met [manager] Ron Fierstein, he asked me what my goal was. And I said, 'Oh, to get a record deal'. I was thinking… [of independent] labels that sold about 100,000 copies each. George Thorogood had sold 100,000 so that was about the top of the line that I could imagine. But he had other ideas. He said, 'I think you could get a major label deal', and I was, like, ' Really?' '
At this, Suzanne Vega starts laughing. 'He was pretty much the only person who seemed to think that. A lot of the advice I got on my way up was along the lines of 'don't quit your day job.''
She continues. 'So he targeted A&M, who turned us down twice before accepting me, finally, the third time. So then I had my deal. I had to deal with people asking, 'Why you and not me?' But I knew [my label's] expectations were very low. I knew they were expecting to sell 30,000, total, of my first album. But we sold 17,000 in the first week. I remember thinking, 'That's not bad…' And that first album went on to sell a lot more.' It sure did: two million copies more, in fact.
As a young 20-something, Suzanne Vega made her bones in clubs such as Gerde's Folk City and the Speak Easy. Guitar in hand, she would roam the streets of Greenwich Village at a time when New York was no place for the faint of heart. A few years earlier, down on the significantly abandoned Lower East Side, the Ramones – themselves rats in leather jackets – had made music and history at CBGB on the Bowery. In concert in Manhattan, in 1981, Simon & Garfunkel sang of a Central Park that 'they say you should not wander after dark'.
Given the city's remarkable transformation to a place of relative safety, as a New Yorker to the marrow in her bones, today, Suzanne Vega has little truck with those who romanticise the days of its dangerous ebb. 'My take on that is that most people who have that kind of nostalgia are a decade older than me,' she says. 'They are of that generation who came from their comfortable middle-class homes on Long Island or New Jersey and discovered a wonderland of drugs and low-rent housing in the city and thought, 'Wow, this is great!' Whereas if you're 12 years old and are trying to make your way home from school, it's not such a nice memory to think back on those times. It was nothing I ever felt nostalgic for, to be honest.'
She adds: 'As a 12-year-old girl in the 1970s, to me it was more like Taxi Driver. I don't look back.'
In typical New York fashion, Suzanne Vega remains wary of her president, too; like all New Yorkers of a certain age, she first knew Donald Trump as a local celebrity. Back then, she says, 'I didn't like him [but] I didn't hate him either because I didn't really think about him. I mean, I didn't think he was New York's finest, but I knew people who admired him. I had relatives who lived in Queens who kept trying to say that I should think about moving into the Trump Estates, out in Queens, but that just didn't appeal to me at all. It wasn't the way I was raised. I was raised to be an artist, so the whole Trump thing was some other thing that was going on somewhere else.'
And now that he's everywhere, all the time? 'He's not a good guy,' she says. 'So that's what I think has created all this antipathy towards him.'
As a songwriter, of course, Suzanne Vega is too deft to coral Trump by name onto the lyric sheet of Flying With Angels. God forbid that she would be so predictable as to simply protest in song. In fact, rather than playing to type, in a curious convergence with the zeitgeist, the album's opening track, Speakers' Corner, aligns itself with a current preoccupation of the right – freedom of speech. 'I have a newfound sympathy,' she sings, 'for the madman in the square, who rants and raves his rhetoric into the midday air.' As the Voltairean principle as rhyming couplet, this, I think, is rather good.
By the song's final verse, though, a warning against those who are 'promising the miracles and pocketing the cash' suggests that reality has started to devour this rosy ideal.
'For some reason [things] seem to have moved farther and farther from the centre,' Vega tells me. 'We're in an era now where the truth is being questioned, where science is being questioned, where the very idea of facts are being questioned. The ground is shifting. So we need to get back to a place where the facts and truth matter.
'And we have to get back to that place because if you're basing all your actions on lies, then you get repercussions. If someone tells you, 'Oh you can definitely jump out of an eighth-floor window and fly'… it doesn't matter what you believe or what you think, or what someone's told you, you're going to find out that you can't. It's provable like that.
'In previous eras these people would be fringe,' she goes on. 'They'd be fringe lunatics. Maybe 10 or 20 percent of the people would be ranting and raving and most people wouldn't be listening.' In other words, minus the lunacy, they'd be like the people who make their way to the stages of folk clubs at which Suzanne Vega got her start.
All in, her continued success is not bad going for a young woman raised in straitened financial circumstances on the mean streets of Manhattan. In the family home, in Spanish Harlem, support came from a mother who told her to pursue her dreams while making sure she paid her bills and a stepfather who believed that, in an insane world, being an artist was the sanest job imaginable.
Not that it was easy, mind, not with large chunks of the country being so (and let's be generous) ambivalent about the place she called home. During early tours of the United States, on some nights, her announcement that she was a singer-songwriter from New York City was met with silence. Occasionally, people would boo.
Sometimes, a few still do. Not that Suzanne Vega minds this, you understand. 'In a sense it doesn't matter,' she says. 'I'm still going to do the same set whether they boo or cheer that I'm from New York. I'm still going to carry on.'