2026 Phoebe Jacobs Honoree

Since her voice was first heard on the radio 40 years ago, Suzanne Vega’s transportive yet grounding music has done just that. Emerging from Greenwich Village folk clubs, Vega has been widely regarded as one of the foremost songwriters of her generation since her 1985 debut, playing sold-out shows around the world. Bearing the stamp of a master storyteller who “observes the world with a clinically poetic eye” (The New York Times), Vega’s songs have tended to focus on city life, ordinary people and real-world subjects. Her work remains immediately recognizable, understated and thoughtful.

 

She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side, raised by her mother, a computer systems analyst, and her stepfather, a Puerto Rican writer, with a heady mix of Motown, bossa nova, jazz and folk playing at home. At 11, she picked up a guitar, and as a teenager she began to write songs. Vega studied dance in high school before attending Barnard College to study literature and theater. In 1979, after attending a Lou Reed concert at Columbia, her vision of contemporary folk started coming into focus. A receptionist by day, she would hang out at the Songwriter’s Exchange in the Village by night. Her self-titled debut album arrived on A&M in 1985, co-produced by Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group. “Marlene on the Wall” was a surprise hit in the U.K. and Rolling Stone eventually included the album in its “100 Greatest Recordings of the 1980s.”

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Ever since Suzanne Vega’s late-80s hits made her synonymous with eloquent, incisive songwriting, she has been fusing reality with the texture of dreams. The New Yorker’s tenth studio album Flying With Angels reinforces this signature synthesis. In 10 poised songs made of earthly emergencies and interior landscapes, of beauty and brutality both, Flying With Angels is a profound testament to dimensions beyond

and within: the refuge we seek in imagination, and how it steels us for living.

 

Flying With Angels is Vega’s first album of new songs in 11 years, if not counting her 2016 record based on her one-woman play about Carson McCullers, or her excellent 2020 live album. In that time Vega’s considerable influence has continued to bloom across a new generation of vanguard artists who remain inspired by her artful narrative songwriting, like Dev Hynes, Caroline Polachek, and Weyes Blood—all born just as Vega was emerging as a leading figure of the ’80s folk revival, as her clear, resonant voice became a radio fixture with hits like “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner.”

 

Flying With Angels composed with her longtime music director Leonard cast a wide net stylistically, they worked with a tight circle of collaborators on a more condensed timeline than usual, and those limitations worked in the album’s favor

 

She describes the lead single “Speakers’ Corner” as a “California, driving-down-the-highway-type song,” though its urgent subject matter belies that breeziness. Its prescient narrative acknowledges the increasingly political nature of communication today, when the ability to speak one’s mind is easier than ever on social media, and yet that privilege is often misused. “Speakers’ corner, there it stands / In politics and song / I guess we better use it now before we find it gone,” Vega sings in the final chorus. She elaborates, “That’s something you don’t want in democracy: the shutting down of the Speakers’ Corner where people get a say. This is a moment in time where people are saying a lot, but sometimes they’re not making sense or not telling the truth. People should be accountable for what they say. They can’t just lie. One would think that that would be self-evident.” Originally, “Speakers’ Corner” was incited by a more personal emergency: In 2023, Vega’s husband, a spoken-word poet and First Amendment lawyer, was recently recovered from COVID-19 when he suffered two strokes that left him nonverbal and having to relearn to speak. The negotiation of voice, of speaking and not speaking, became a recurring motif on Flying With Angels.

 

Suspended aloft, the title track is about caregiving. “I felt this sense of being supported by energy in the middle of an emergency… this idea that you’re being born aloft by something stronger than you,” Vega said. Perhaps befitting a song about inner strength, there’s a tinge of Vega’s enduring influence, Laurie Anderson, in her delivery.

 

Vega juxtaposes these harsh realities with more hopeful interior scenes on Flying With Angels. “The storyteller’s job,” Vega says, “is to take you somewhere you haven’t been, not just show you what you know.”

 

1987’s follow-up, Solitude Standing—again co-produced by Addabbo and Kaye—elevated her to star status. The album hit #2 in the U.K. and #11 in U.S., was nominated for three Grammys (including Record of the Year) and went platinum, selling three million copies. “Luka” entered the cultural vernacular—likely the only hit ever written from the perspective of an abused boy. Vega continues to support children’s and human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Children’s Aid and Covenant House. The opening song on Solitude Standing was an a cappella piece, “Tom’s Diner,” about a nondescript restaurant near Columbia University. Without Vega’s permission, it was remixed by U.K. electronic dance duo DNA; suddenly Vega’s voice was showing up in the unlikeliest of settings, the club. She permitted an official release of the “Tom’s Diner” remix, which reached #5 on the Billboard pop chart and went gold. Vega continues to forge new ground creatively, from the industrial-folk innovations on 1992’s 99.9F to her Grammy-winning 2007 album Beauty & Crime, and her celebrated recent work in theater and film.