Flying with Angels reminds us that Suzanne Vega has always excelled at channelling life’s outsider observers

On her first album in almost a decade, folk-pop icon Suzanne Vega daydreams her way into the mind of the chambermaid Bob Dylan addressed in his 1966 song, “I Want You”. The elegant title track of Flying with Angels breathes enigmatic life into a woman to whom Dylan described returning amid the chaos of his world because“she knows that I'm not afraid to look at her/ She is good to me and there’s/ Nothing she doesn't see/ She knows where I'd like to be…”

A perfect character for Vega, then. The New York singer-songwriter has always excelled at channelling life’s outsider observers: note the cool detachment of the solo coffee drinker in her 1984 single “Tom’s Diner” and how she lends her voice to an abused boy in her 1987 hit “Luka”. These are characters who meet the listener’s gaze without surrendering their agency and mystery. I grew up in thrall to her first three albums. On the walk home from school – if I wanted to keep my head up passing the popular kids – I’d play “Left of Centre” (1986), in which she charmed me into a state of nonchalant defiance I could only dream of attaining without her help. This was composure you could absorb and wear like a cloak. Only The Smiths were as good at making loneliness feel so exhilarating, and they were blokes with far fewer judgemental stares to deflect.

So the heroine of “Chambermaid” might “clean the crumbs” from the “great man’s” typewriter but it’s less an act of grim service than an opportunity to “finger sentences he’s made/ I follow every curving of his brain/ Mhhhm.” Her slyer desire matches his bluntly overt repetitions of “I want you”. She also nails Dylan’s slippery relationship with the truth: “You want to know - did I ever steal?/ He never leaves anything out that’s real.” Although she says the only thing she stole was a kiss, she’s actually walked off with the melody of “I Want You” jangling through her own electro-acoustic tune like a set of keys in her pocket. Touche, hey Bob!

The current state of politics in the US forces Vega to be more direct than usual on “Speakers’ Corner” – a rather chugging track driven by a slide guitar – on which she reminds her countryfolk to use their freedom of speech to rail against injustice while they still can. On the lullsome acoustic elegy of “The Last Train from Mariupol”, she laments “all of humanity fleeing” the brutality of war. “The Rats” is a more entertaining bit of directness, a scruffy, punky little number in which she echoes the squeal of the rodent population rising up beneath the urban scene. She grew up hearing tales of rats, being raised in one of the poorest parts of New York City, and believed herself to be half-Puerto Rican until she was nine, when she found out her stepfather was not her real dad. An identity-shattering, community-losing revelation to which she traces the sense of dislocation that runs through her work.

Vega’s back on classic cryptic form with songs such as the grating, electric “Witch” (about a man enduring a terrifying encounter with another woman while out with his wife), “Alley” (on which she sings of “shimmering like [painter] Marc Chagall in love”) and the haunting “Galway” (about the missed opportunity for an Irish love affair). At times, Vega’s use of clunky rhymes undoes the elegance of her more literary lines. She can get away with “ambulance peal/ population squeal” amid the daftness of “Rats”, but her passionate tribute to country singer Lucinda Williams slops a little as she hymns Williams’s “cowboy slouch/ Stage star amble/ I love her cause/ She’s blunt and humble.”

It’s still lovely to have Vega back in action. Her level-head, outward-facing ideas and collected tone really steady the heart and offer the mind safe opportunities to wander. At a time when loneliness is an epidemic all of its own, it’s rather wonderful to see solitude re-empowered.