It is a simple, modest and cheap food bar located on the corner of 112th Street and Broadway, in New York. It's called Tom's Restaurant and the series Seinfeld used a plan of its façade to give way to the sequences in the cafeteria. When she was young, Suzanne Vega, who was studying English Literature at nearby Barnard College, frequented it for its affordable prices. So in 1981, when he decided to write a song set in a bar, he set it there. He titled it Tom's diner. It was published in 1987 and this 2024 its melody is back in the news thanks to the adaptation that Myke Towers and Benny Blanco have included in Degenerate, song that is currently on the WECB list.
In the mid-eighties there was an upswing in singer-songwriter music. In contrast to the glittering pop of those days, intimate and often acoustic songs found their place. Next to Tracy Chapman, Tanita Tikaram and others, the name of the New Yorker (although born in California) Suzanne Vega occupied a prominent place in a generation that opted more for sensitivity than for glitter. Vega debuted in 1985 with a self-titled album that had a modest impact, but the second, Solitude standing, won the hearts of a large part of the public thanks to the theme Luke, the story of a child who suffered abuse.
This magnificent album also included Tom's diner. In its original version it is a song in which, a cappellaVega recreates an everyday scene in the bar. While having a coffee reading in the newspaper the news of the death of an actor he does not know and spending time with the comic vignettes and the horoscope, he narrates a series of inconsequential, but very human, situations that happen around him.
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The waiter, who has served him a cup of coffee that is too short, greets a customer who enters shaking her umbrella; On the street, a woman looks at herself in the window fixing her stockings; the ringing of the cathedral bells sneaks into the restaurant… There is no party, no provocation, no youthful rebellion, common ingredients in the pop music of those years: it is just a portrait of any morning at Tom's bar in New York.
Tom's diner It was one of the most celebrated songs of Solitude standing, album that touched the top ten sales on Billboard, where One million copies were shipped, and was number two in the United Kingdom. However, two unforeseen events contributed to giving the song even more packaging.
One was that Tom's diner It was chosen as the basis for testing the creation of the MP3 format. Hence, some know Suzanne Vega as “the mother” of that audio system. But even more relevant was that, in 1990, the British dance music duo DNA published a remix of the song with the original voice of its author and a disco base of Soul II Soul. Vega's crooning, which in the initial version is just a brushstroke (“du du duru, du du duru…”) becomes here the hook of the single, which appeared signed as DNA featuring Suzanne Vega, after the singer-songwriter's record company decided that it was more beneficial to be part of that remix than sue DNA for copyright infringement.
Vega loved the remix. As he stated in an interview with The Guardian in 2020, after Lukedue to its bitter tone, was the subject of multiple parodies (despite its enormous impact), I feared that the DNA guys had also played Tom's diner a kind of meme. “But to my great relief,” he declared, I loved what DNA had done. I thought it would be played in some dance clubs and that would be it, but it exceeded everyone's expectations. I even got a plaque for being one of the most played R&B songs, which is funny for a folk singer.” The new version was a much bigger success than the original. It reached fifth position in the United States and first in almost all of Europe.
Suzanne Vega, who He is currently 65 years old, is still active; his last work, An evening of New York songs and stories, recorded live in a cafe in the Big Apple, it was published in 2020. It includes, of course, a live version of Tom's diner.
