Singer Suzanne Vega Takes Her Act Uptown

Recorded in 2019 at Cafe Carlyle, the storied New York cabaret room, “Evening” came out last September, in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now Ms. Vega has finally been able to announce a new tour of Northeastern cities starting in September, but she’s not sure which of her many musical personas will be on stage. “By the time we get to the end of the pandemic, I may be ready to try some other thing,” she says. “But on the other hand, maybe I’ll get that dress out of the closet.”

Ms. Vega’s reputation as an experimental, adventurous artist dates back to 1990, when her third album, “Days of Open Hand,” was struggling to get attention. “The record had no traction,” Ms. Vega recalls with a laugh. “Nobody liked it or wanted to hear it,” even though her previous album, “Solitude Standing,” had gone platinum thanks to the hit single “Luka.”

One day, she remembers, she was taping Arsenio Hall’s late-night show when her manager appeared backstage and told her that two British producers had made a bootleg remix of “Tom’s Diner,” an a cappella track from “Solitude Standing.” A&M Records was about to file a lawsuit to have the song pulled, but he thought she might want to hear it first. Ms. Vega put on headphones and immediately loved the remix, which spun a driving dance beat around her original vocal. Her song was transformed in a way that embraced and enhanced the original. “I thought it sounded really cool and suggested that instead of suing these kids, we buy the track and put it out,” Ms. Vega recalls. “That worked out great.”

“Tom’s Diner” 2.0, released by “DNA featuring Suzanne Vega,” became an international smash that took Ms. Vega into dance clubs and continues to get frequent play. She followed up that success with two sonically adventurous albums, “99.9F°” and “Nine Objects of Desire,” which stand as high points of 90s alternative music. Both albums were produced by Mitchell Froom, whom Ms. Vega married. Their daughter Ruby Froom, now 26, sometimes sings with her.

Ms. Vega continued to work in a variety of settings, collaborating with minimalist composer Phillip Glass and co-writing a Broadway play with Duncan Sheik. But she had never done a cabaret act, and Cafe Carlyle, in the Upper East Side’s Carlyle Hotel, was a long way from the Greenwich Village folk scene where she got her start.

“The Cafe Carlyle is a quintessential New York venue, but it’s not a world I was familiar with until my neighbor Judy Collins kept telling me how much she loved playing there,” says Ms. Vega. “I wasn’t of the class that would hang out there, but you enter a fantastic world when you walk into the Cafe Carlyle. Legends and ghosts of people like JFK and Marilyn Monroe inhabit the hallways.”

Ms. Vega decided that it would be wrong to treat the swanky, hallowed venue as “some random folk or rock club” and opted to treat her run at Cafe Carlyle almost like a theatrical presentation. “I decided that I was going to have a look and there was going to be a theme: New York City,” Ms. Vega recalls. “That worked so well that by the end of the first week, I decided to record the second week.”

It was a perfect theme for a distinctly Manhattan artist. Ms. Vega grew up in East Harlem, majored in English at Barnard College and has lived in Manhattan her entire life. The city permeates her writing and her cool, almost deadpan delivery of even the most wrenching topics, which has always been a hallmark of her work. It’s a style that keeps the emphasis on Ms. Vega’s literate lyrics and allows her to tell stories at a slight remove, like the narrator of a pithy short story. She says that she always listened to music that way and that it took her years to realize not everyone pays attention to the words of a song first.

“I thought if you weren’t going to write really good lyrics, what’s the point?” she says. “I thought the words were the potatoes and the music was the serving dish. For five years as I was getting started, I was deeply immersed in a Greenwich Village scene of people who loved songwriting and were not afraid to write about politics or to talk about melodies and metaphors. It was a real art form, deeper than being obsessed with getting signed and having hits, kind of left over from Bob Dylan’s forays into Folk City.”

Ms. Vega says she has always “gone where my imagination has taken me and not worried about what to call it,” writing “songs that were very folky and others that were edgier.” If she is mainly known as a folk singer, she credits it to the fact that the only instrument she plays is acoustic guitar: “Pretty much anything you play on an acoustic guitar is going to be considered folky by the average passerby.”

In fact, Ms. Vega says, “the kind of music that I like is very wide ranging, everything from Motown to jazz to old folk songs to some new wave—and Lou Reed, who was a very large influence.” The only song she performs on the new album that she didn’t write is Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” But even “if I sang at the top of my lungs, it would still come out sounding cool and reserved,” she says. “I’m not sure why that is, but in my early demo tapes, my voice was rougher and it sounded like I was shouting when I was just trying to project. And it wasn’t cool shouting like Janis Joplin; it just sounded ugly. So I developed this singing style, which seems to work.”