Suzanne Vega reinvented as an independent artist

Suzanne Vega has been away. It’s seven years since her last studio album. She has had to reinvent herself as an independent artist; she was dropped by her label. So she painstakingly re-recorded her best-known songs, to exert some ownership over her back catalogue. However, last month she finally a released a collection of new material, written with her long-time musical director, Dubliner Gerry Leonard (perhaps better known as David Bowie’s guitar-slinger on the album The Next Day).

Vega performs many tracks from the new LP for a sold-out Olympia. But she starts with an oldie. Donning an incongruous top hat, Vega coos her way through ‘Marlene On The Wall,’ a paean to adolescent yearning, penned when she was young herself, in 1985 (the hat, she says, is in tribute to the song’s subject matter, Marlene Dietrich).