Lifelong New Yorker Suzanne Vega, 54, knows almost every corner of Manhattan: She lived in Chelsea, Tribeca, the Meatpacking District and the Lower East Side before returning to her native Upper West about 10 years ago. “Moving is a huge pain in the ass, but it’s almost always indicative of my financial situation,” she explains. “When I had money, I had a big apartment. As you get less money, the apartments get less and less big.” But all that moving has given the singer plenty of inspiration. As her new album, “Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles,” drops on Tuesday, Vega shares the NYC origins of her best-loved songs. This is her lyrical New York.
Ground Zero, Liberty and Church streets
Song: “Anniversary”
“That whole song takes place the year after 9/11. There was this weird circular wind that was blowing around Ground Zero [around the first anniversary], and it just seemed like there were all these spirits in the wind.”
23rd Street and Eighth Avenue
Song: “Luka”
“This was written on Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street, half a block away from the Chelsea Hotel. I lived there for two years, and there was a Luka who lived upstairs from me. Unlike the song, he was not an abused child, just a kid I knew from the neighborhood. I was struck by his name because I couldn’t tell from it what nationality he was. The song came out in ’87, and I had moved away by then. I know he knew about the song because my [former] roommate told me that he came to the door one day with a girl and said, ‘Can you tell this girl that Suzanne Vega really did live here?’ If I had any idea how popular the song would be, I probably would have thought twice about using a real name.”
Little West 12th Street, between Ninth Avenue and the West Side Highway
Song: “Language”
“The lyric is, ‘Let’s go back to the building/on Little West 12th.’ At that point, I had a fantasy of buying a loft, and I guess I’d seen a loft for sale on Little West 12th. It was a little fantasy place that I’d always imagined buying.”
Vestry Street, between Canal Street and the West Side Highway
Song: “Thin Man”
“The ‘Thin Man’ is death — the personification of death. In that song, he’s sort of hating me and stalking me through the streets of New York, and there’s one that’s mentioned, Vestry Street in Tribeca: ‘In the back seat of a taxi down Vestry Street.’ It was one of those bumpy cobblestone streets in Tribeca, and I lived there for 10 years. I loved the atmosphere.”
Ludlow Street, Lower East Side
Song: “Ludlow Street”
“Ludlow was the site of many parties back in the ’80s. I remember one, in particular, that started on New Year’s Eve and went on for several days. Later on, my brother lived on Ludlow, and he was also involved in that partying. He passed away right after 9/11, and after [that] it became a place of memories for me. That’s what ‘Ludlow Street’ is about: those memories. For a long time, I found it hard to sing. Now I can sing it.”
W Hotel, 541 Lexington Ave., between 49th and 50th streets
Song: “New York Is a Woman”
“I happened to be in the W, which had just gone up around that time. ‘New York Is a Woman’ is a song in which New York is the seductress, and the protagonist is this guy who has come in from the suburbs, and he falls in love with New York City. The opening line of the song, ‘New York City spread herself before you with her bangles and her spangles and her stars.’ That’s 42nd Street, looking down from the 27th floor.”
Central Park South
Song: “Frank & Ava”
“Frank Sinatra had an apartment on Central Park South, and he lived there either when he was courting Ava Gardner or when they were married. But they had a big fight in that apartment, and she threw her jewelry out the window. All of this is mentioned in ‘Frank & Ava.’ ”
Tom’s Restaurant, 2880 Broadway, at 112th Street
Song: “Tom’s Diner”
“I used to go [here] when I was going to Barnard, and after I graduated. It was a plain, ordinary place to get a plain, ordinary cup of coffee, and that’s one of the things I liked about it: the utilitarian quality of the food and the service. So I thought of this story line of someone who was kind of alienated . . . not really connected to anything other than what concerned that person directly. I was thinking of how my friend Brian, a photographer, said he saw the world through a pane of glass, and I was trying to see the world through that pane of glass.”
Firemen’s Memorial in Riverside Park, 100th Street and Riverside Drive
Song: “Zephyr & I”
“When I was a teenager, if you didn’t have a place to go or didn’t like going home, you would either hang out at West End Avenue or go to the Firemen’s Monument. The song talks about those kids hanging out. They were a little older than I was.”