Suzanne Vega – Flying With Angels

Ah, Suzanne Vega. The general public only came to know her when a dance act violated her repertoire and reduced “Tom’s Diner” to a trifle by focusing mainly on the part where Vega merely hums the melody. And that while “Tom’s Diner” addressed a serious theme: the lonely person who sees lovers meeting in a restaurant, turns away her gaze, and quasi-nonchalantly pours milk into her coffee. The American singer-songwriter is a true master at creating atmosphere. You feel the loneliness cutting through everything, as if you are sitting in that restaurant watching the narrator who lives in the song. Just as you empathise with “Luca,” there on the second floor, wondering if the downstairs neighbour ever hears the arguments. Or with the woman in love in her room, with the Marlene Dietrich poster that looks mockingly at her.

Vega doesn’t compose. She paints songs.

That’s what we’ve missed. We’ve had to wait a full decade for new material. We subsisted on “Tom’s Diner” and “Marlene on the Wall,” but simultaneously yearned for new little paintings. “Flying with Angels” must try to satisfy our hunger for now. There’s one thing you can be assured of with the now 65-year-old Vega: the songs are about something, starting with “Speaker’s Corner,” named after the place in London’s Hyde Park where people have traditionally shared their opinions. Nowadays, we have social media, where anyone can freely ventilate their opinion, whether founded or not. Disinformation, threats, shouting matches: it worries the American.

Back to the last album, dating from 2016: “Lover, Beloved: Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers.” That album sounded jazzy, especially in songs like “New York is My Destination” and “Harper Lee” which was even straight-up swing. If we place that album next to this new “Flying With Angels,” the conclusion must be that Vega’s voice has changed. The timbre is slightly lower, and sometimes the singing has become more like a kind of proclamation. No worries: the voice is still recognisable out of thousands, only the range seems somewhat more limited. Now, Vega didn’t necessarily have to rely on that. You listen to a Vega for those little paintings and the storytelling, whereby it’s further notable that the musical framing is not only very varied but here and there more robust than on many previous albums. An example of this is “Witch,” which evolves into a track that evokes associations with the late work of Roxy Music, including a serious, almost bombastic ending with raw guitar and fat synths, on which Vega again recites text more than sings it.

The subsequent “Chambermaid” is then again such a typical Vega number, although the comparison with “I Want You” by Bob Dylan imposes itself: the melody line and chord scheme are almost identical. Only on “Love Thief” do we hear the singer going higher again, and once more this is a completely different genre: “Love Thief” is a pure soul song, with a funky guitar riff, strings, and the typical soul harmony singing in the choruses.

Musically speaking, this is without any doubt one of the strongest and certainly most varied albums the American has ever made. Each song seamlessly connects to the emotion, the feeling that Vega paints in poetic lyrics. These are lyrics that sometimes require effort to fully comprehend and sometimes leave nothing to the imagination. The finest example of this is “Last Train From Mariupol”: Who is still on that last train from the devastated city? The atmosphere in the song is dark, threatening. “God himself was on the last train,” sings Vega as the sound swells, growing louder, until everything falls silent, as the city itself has fallen silent. You see the train departing from the destruction on the horizon. It is one of the most moving pieces on the album.

The last little painting takes place on the Irish west coast, in “Galway,” where the singer, musing by the waterside, wonders what major changes still await us, what fate has in store, and how the wind will turn. “Every song on the album deals with struggle. The struggle to survive, to speak, to dominate, win, escape, help someone or simply, to live,” Vega wrote on Facebook when she announced this album. That struggle is packaged in an exhibition with ten new paintings.

These are not paintings you just walk past. You must give it time, look at the image and marvel at the use of color, composition, and especially the perspective that is always different. You stand still in wonder, contemplating what the painter meant, what thought lies behind choices. The painter makes the viewer part of the painting, who is never just standing at a distance watching. That viewer is the audience in “Speaker’s Corner,” fends off the rats that swarm in millions through New York’s sewers in the Fontaines D.C.-inspired “Rats,” and watches with sorrow as a last train departs from the ruins that were once a prosperous city.

The museum attendant in the room gets up from his chair and taps you on the shoulder to report that the museum is about to close. But you want to look a little longer, searching for the deeper layers in the painting. You walk on to the next one: where colors are rawer, the paint seems thrown onto the canvas, while on another painting love is mainly depicted, the love of angels lifting someone up, far away from this place where there is too much destruction and uncertainty about the future prevails. That’s why we need people who paint and capture the world. That’s what Suzanne Vega does. Sometimes sweet, sometimes confrontationally hard, but always with elegance and thanks to a richer palette in a greater diversity of styles. After ten years, she does not disappoint. (8/10) (Cooking Vinyl)