Songwriter and poet Suzanne Vega has lived many lives, written verses that will survive centuries, and achieved accolades beyond comprehension. Yet her creative pulse beats louder than ever. So, what keeps it ticking?
“In some ways my career has always reflected the ideas of the time that I have lived in, and that I am now living in,” Suzanne Vega says, slowly but surely, philosophising her own existence with the kind of casual confidence that comes with age, experience and wisdom.
The 66-year-old has lived more than most. A poet, songwriter, musician, producer, philanthropist, dancer, mother and wife, for 40 years the American folk heroine has been the voice of many, and a gateway of truth. A balladeer of the past, the embodiment of the present, and a hope for the future.
She’s released ten studio albums, the latest as recently as last year. She’s received seven Grammy nominations, winning once in 1991, and delivered one of the awards’ defining performances at the 1988 ceremony. She’s published a book (1998’s The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writing of Suzanne Vega), written plays, and premiered films. She was the first female solo artist to ever headline Glastonbury. She’s the mother of the MP3.
And she is far from done.
Suzanne, a fascinating conversational presence with the vivacity of a performer and the wit of a writer, is freshly home in New York as we convene. She has lived there for pretty much all of her life, having moved as an infant from California. She has been touring Europe for the past few weeks, and she’ll be back out on the road through much of this summer, taking Flying With Angels, her latest studio album, across the festival circuit.
“The hunger comes from trying to make sense of my environment,” Suzanne explains on her unflinching desire to continue to create new work, over four decades since she announced herself with her critically adored self-titled debut album in 1985. “I was the kind of kid who started writing very early, little poems and things, playing with styles. Now, we’re living in really weird and terrifying times, and that’s what keeps me going. It’s one method of problem solving; that proverbial grain of sand that gets into the oyster and irritates you until you do something about it.”
Flying With Angels observes and epitomises the complexity and confusion of the contemporary world. Layered in texture, eclectic in tone, the concise near-38-minute tracklist is filled with discerning social commentary, punkish attitude and vivid wordsmithery. It began taking shape during the COVID pandemic, with the track “Rats” – one of the album’s earliest constructions – a piercing satire of the rodent problem that her home city was plagued by during the New York lockdown. “Of course it had to be a punk rock song,” she quips. “Because you can’t write some gentle folky song about rats invading your neighbourhood.”
“We need our angels,” she sighs. “We have enough rats.”
Oddly uplifting, rousingly political and endearingly personal, the album is arguablySuzanne’s best work since the turn of the century. But each of her 10 albums, from her 1985 self-titled debut to her commercial breakthrough sophomore in 1987, Solitude Standing, and the boundary-pushing experimentation of 1996’s Nine Objects Of Desire, represents something unique to her. They are a signpost to not only her sound but to the circumstances and context they were made within. Fragments of their maker’s stained-glass soul.
“People always assume that your album is a kind of diary – which I’ve always fought against, because it’s boring,” Suzanne chuckles. “But it kind of is; every album has its place and time. With each one, I’ve thought about how I could take the acoustic guitar and meld it with the technology of the day. That’s the core of each, and also the difference, because you have a starting intention, and then the way that intention unravels is different depending on the access that you have. There’s always a chorus, and my voice is generally the same. But the look is different, the way the songs are dressed is different.”
It was in the late 1980s that Suzanne wrote the opening chapters of her ever-growing artistic legacy. Her dazzling, era-defining second album Solitude Standing – which boasts the remarkably catchy “Tom’s Diner” and the devastating depiction of domestic abuse, “Luka”, as the opening two tracks – made her a household name. Her Grammy performance at the 1988 ceremony, where she was nominated three times, signed, sealed and delivered her stardom.
“I felt very vulnerable and very exposed,” she admits, recalling the performance when she took to the stage to an audience of millions with just her song, “Luka”, and her acoustic guitar. In an epoch dominated by the pop maximalism of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, et al, the sparse and intimate performance sent tender shock waves through the industry. “At the time, it was really all about how many sequins you could put onto clothing,” Suzanne remembers. “So this figure of a girl on the stage with her guitar was very much against the grain.”
A year on from her historic Grammy appearance, Suzanne became the first solo female artist ever to headline Glastonbury Festival. Death threats, bulletproof vests and cows ruining the party – it’s quite the story:
“It was insane. A girl had become obsessed with my bass player and tried to…I don’t want to give this person too much of a platform, but just know that my manager took it seriously. Scotland Yard got involved, and I had not realised until about an hour before I was going on stage that I had also been implicated in this threat. They said, ‘We have to give you a formal declaration that we recommend that you not do the show.’ They had found one person who was involved in the incident but hadn’t found the other. I was supposed to go on at 11 pm, and it was 10 pm. And we’re all there; we’ve come all this way. I thought, ‘I just have to do this; otherwise anybody could threaten me at any time, and they would think I’ll back down.’”
“Everyone in the band said, ‘We’re with you.’ So Scotland Yard said I would have to wear a bulletproof vest. One guy there who had one on, who was probably twice my size, took his off and gave it to me. They had to gaffer tape it closed because it was massive. I put a denim jacket over it; I felt like a turtle going on stage.”
“We did the show, but we had to come off early,” she continues. “My keyboard player came over and said, ‘Sing “Luka” and get off stage.’ So I did. They hadn’t told us about the curfew because the cows in the next field were sensitive. They didn’t like the sound going beyond midnight or something like that. So that’s how the evening ended – with us all stuck in the mud.”
Despite a looming danger and the cow-induced premature finish, Suzanne upholds a“certain pride” in being Glastonbury’s inaugural female solo headliner. But it is a weirder, wilder anecdote that is perhaps her pièce de résistance. She is, after all, the mother of the MP3. “This was a surprise to me; I didn’t know it had happened,” she laughs. In the refinement of the now-ubiquitous MP3 file format, German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg used Suzanne’s voice from the a capella “Tom’s Diner” as the primary reference track. It’s an odd, but consequential achievement. And, you’d think, a great story for a dinner party. “I’m not happy that it destroyed the music industry as we knew it, but it was kind of fascinating to witness it and to be there for that kind of history.”
Through her writing, musical progression and personal accolades, Suzanne has been a lens into eras, a reflection of the times. She has been the tipping point of popular culture without ever succumbing to it. But was she – or is she – a pop star? “I did unquestionably have the chart success,” she shrugs. “I found myself amongst other pop stars. All of a sudden I’m there standing next to Debbie Harry. But do I live there? No. Do I get up in the morning and do my face? No. I admire pop stars who really live that. But I live a different kind of life, and I love it. I have a lot of other hats that I put on when I’m not on stage.”
Not unlike Miley. It’s clear to see why someone like Suzanne – who is so much more than just a singer-songwriter – has our cover star’s utmost respect, in front of and away from the microphone. And that feeling of admiration is mutual. “Of course I’ve noticed her,” Suzanne smiles. “She’s a pop star. Her heart is in the right place. I’ve seen her go through these changes, you know, these phases that girls go through. Privately as well as publicly. I like her for her struggles that she’s been through. She’s done it all with heart and grace.”
Coming from Suzanne Vega – the mother of the MP3, the Glasto queen, the paradigm of what being an artist means – that’s a hell of a compliment.
WONDERLAND SUMMER 2026. GUEST EDITED BY MILEY CYRUS. SHOP NOW.
Photography Mario Sorrenti
Chief Creative Officer & Styling Alastair McKimm
Words Ben Tibbits
Hair Bob Recine
Make-up Diane Kendal
Set Design Philipp Haemmerle
Executive Producer Dana Brockman
Producer Max Bonbrest
Casting Alexandra Antonova for Samuel Ellis Scheinman
Lighting Technician Lars Beaulieu
1st Photo Assistant Kotaro Kawashima
Photo Assistants Paolo Afante, Kurt Mangum
Digital Tech Charles Meyer
Fashion Assistants Taylor Wood, Kassidy Taylor
Hair Assistant Jeelan Aleem
Make-up Assistants Eduardo Jiminez, Breanna Harmon
Set Assistants Oscar Haemmerle, Xavier Mozejewski
Production Assistant Din Morris