Interview: Suzanne Vega on punk rock, sampling and her new album Flying With Angels

The critically acclaimed singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega is known for her poetic lyrics and distinctive voice. Vega’s hits, including "Tom's Diner" and "Luka,” achieved international success.

WFYI’s Kyle Long recently spoke with Suzanne Vega. They discussed her upcoming appearance in Indianapolis and how the rock legend Lou Reed influenced her work.

This transcript has been edited for style and clarity.

Kyle Long: Suzanne, you'll be performing in Indianapolis on March 24 at the Tobias theater at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Suzanne Vega: My pleasure.

Long: You have a new record coming out in May. The album is titled Flying With Angles. You've released two singles from the record “Rats” and “Speakers’ Corner,” both of which have a very pronounced rock and roll sound. I want to ask you about the song “Rats” in particular, which I understand was influenced by punk rock music. You grew up in New York at a time when punk rock was really exploding. I'm curious about your relationship with punk rock music and what inspired you to explore that sound on rats.

Vega: I had a tricky relationship with punk rock and rock and roll in general. I mean, I was a real die-hard folkie in the ‘70s, which is when I was in high school, so I didn't really pay that much attention to the punk rock scene, except that the very first show I ever saw was to see Lou Reed at Columbia University in 1979 and that had a profound effect on me.

So considering that he's the godfather of punk, I guess there was this sort of influence there at the root. So it took me a while to get caught up, like I didn't really start to get into the Ramones until probably the ‘90s, but they were around and the whole CBGB thing was happening right across town from Folk City, where I was always hanging out. But you know, there's quite a bit of traffic going on between the two clubs.

Long: You mentioned Lou Reed, he's been a huge influence throughout your career. I believe you still perform “Walk On The Wild Side” in your live sets. I know you've performed with Lou Reed. He interviewed you, I’ve seen a video from MTV, a really awkward video. You had this experience seeing him perform, which was so profoundly influential. Tell me about developing a relationship with him as an artist, and how his his music still lives on in what you do.

Vega: What a nice question. Yeah, I got to know him, actually pretty well. It started off on that TV show, where I completely fell apart on camera because I wasn't expecting it, and he's asking all these questions that I hadn't prepared. But I started to run into him all over town at these various events, and over time, we became actual friends and had some very interesting conversations over time.

First of all, I realized when I went to see him that I recognized the world he wrote about, that there was this hardcore element of truth in what he was writing about it. Lou Reed, I don't think has contains a single metaphor in any of his songs. You know, he's not like Paul Simon, who's like 'everything is like other things.'

No, Lou Reed, it's like he's factually hitting you in the face with whatever it is that he's talking about. When I go to Lou Reed for inspiration, I go to sharpen my edges and to write about real things, to the point where, when I wrote “Luka” in one day. I was listening to Lou Reed’s Berlin album, which is a very acoustic album about abuse. Basically the whole album is like a song cycle about a couple and what they're going through.

So I was trying to write about this issue of child abuse, and I listened to the Berlin album to get myself in that mood, and the whole song came out in about two hours. If I need a bit of that energy, that frontal, confronting energy, I go there.

Long: Suzanne, you'll be performing songs from Flying With Angles during your upcoming concert in Indianapolis. You'll also be performing music from your catalog of songs. If you don't mind, I want to ask you about a couple of your iconic songs. For many years, I made my living as a club DJ playing various sorts of electronic music. You sort of accidentally created one of the most important songs in electronic dance music, your song “Tom's Diner,” which has existed in I think, multiple forms through the years.

The a capella version from your 1987 album, Solitude Standing was sampled by the British electronic music producer's DNA. It became a hit record. The song has been sampled hundreds of times zince then by artists like Destiny's Child, Drake, and Snoop Dogg. At that time in 1990, terms like sampling and remix hadn't really entered the mainstream lexicon. I'm curious just what your initial emotions and thoughts were when you heard this remix. I mean, had you been at all adjacent to electronic dance music that time, or was this something that just kind of caught you off guard back in 1991?

Vega: First of all, I love to dance. I was always a fan of dance music, because I was a dancer, I had an immediate visceral response, which was, I really love this. I also grew up in neighborhoods where there was a lot of rapping going on, sort of before rap became a thing in music.

Before it was a thing in music, it was like a game people would play like on the stoops, where you would say things in rhyme and try and make yourself look really good and put down the other person. And you had to do it fast, and you had to have a flow, and you had to do it in rhyme. So I got where DNA were coming from, and I laughed. I thought, this is this is fantastic.

Long: Your album, Solitude Standing included the song “Luka,” which became an international hit for you. You wrote and recorded that song at a time when victims of abuse weren't really encouraged to speak out about their experiences. I'm curious if you had any fear, trepidation, or anxiety about recording that song and sharing it publicly, because I know it did come from a personal place for you.

Vega: I did yeah, I had anxiety about releasing “Luka,” and when I first started singing it, I found it was a problematic song. It's wasn't a song like “Gypsy,” which everybody wanted to hear and was, like, very comforting and made everybody feel good with a chorus.

When I sang “Luka,” it made people feel uncomfortable. Sometimes they didn't know what it was about, and when they did figure it out, they were sometimes embarrassed, or they were, you know, they looked down at the floor. So it was really my manager, Ron Fiarstein, who heard the song, came and said, “Is this a song about a topic? Is this a song about an issue? Is this song about child abuse?” And I said, 'Yeah, it is.' And he said, 'I think this song could be a hit.' And I was just like, 'What? Why would you think that it makes everyone feel so weird?'

I was grateful to myself that I had written it. I did it in the first person, but again, it's almost like a dramatic monologue where it's coming from another point of view, and that was necessary for me at that time. I was happy, in the end, that I did it that way. That gave me some distance from it.

Long: Thank you so much for taking a few minutes to talk. I've been following your work since I was literally a child. I'm so happy that you'll be here in Indianapolis, and you're continuing to write and release exciting music. So thank you so much.

Vega: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

This interview originally aired on WFYI's Cultural Manifesto.