The second album by Suzanne Vega, a New York-based singer-songwriter obsessed with Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed who had become misleadingly pegged as a folk singer, began with “Tom’s Diner”, an a cappella song set in a restaurant, that had “popped into [her] head fully formed”. Although the album, Solitude Standing (released in 1987) did well, this song made the top 30 in Ireland, grazed the top 60 in the UK, and flopped elsewhere.
And then something strange happened. Three years later, in 1990, two enterprising musicians from Bath added minimal sound-system beats from Soul II Soul’s “Keep On Movin’” to the song, and when Vega’s record company was about to reach for its lawyers, the singer suggested they put it out as an official release. This time, “Tom’s Diner (DNA Remix)” was inescapable — topping the charts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, reaching number two in the UK and Ireland and number five in the US. It is now probably Vega’s best-known song.
The song itself is a piece of disassociated reportage. The narrator sits — as did Vega in 1981 and 1982, when she was a student at nearby Barnard College — in Tom’s Diner in Manhattan, reading the obituary of an actor (William Holden) who was “no one I had heard of”. Her coffee is underfilled. A woman outside stares at her own reflection in the window.
“I had just been in Tom’s,” Vega told me in 2010, “and I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a song called ‘Tom’s Diner’ about alienation, where you’re not connected to anything you see, you’re kind of seeing everything through a pane of glass. Lately on the internet I’ve been reading people saying this song is really random and it’s about nothing. It’s not about nothing! It’s about something! Every single scene has been set up to show that this person is alienated from life in general.”
But it is less the lyrics, more the minor-key scatted broken chord that punctuates the song, that took on a life of its own. Vega’s “doo de doo doo” started to crop up in all sorts of settings. A year later her record label compiled some on Tom’s Album, including a rap version from After One, a German-language take from Peter Behrens and a Swedish translation from Mats Höjer; a live reading from Michael Stipe with Billy Bragg beatboxing and interpolating Madness’s “Baggy Trousers” and EMF’s “Unbelievable”.
More seriously, one track on the album, Beth Watson’s “Waiting at the Border”, reimagined the song from the point of view of an American soldier at the start of Operation Desert Storm, “waiting at the border/for the man to give the order … pretending that I’m holding you/instead of my M-1”. Watson’s voicing the internal monologue of an infantryman mirrors the dissociation of the original.
“Oh my God, it’s never-ending”, said Vega 10 years ago, discussing the enduring appeal of the song. “It feels like it’s never going to die off. The melody is very simple and for whatever reason it’s stuck in everybody’s head.”
But she revelled in the reinterpretations. “You have all different kinds of diners. You have Tupac’s ‘Dopefiend’s Diner’. There’s a million different ways you can do that. The last one I’ve heard about is this hip-hop artist called Drake.” We shrugged at each other with no-me-neither expressions. “Danger Mouse did one. Ludacris. Destiny’s Child. I did one with a band called The Roots. It’s always coming at me from some weird angle.” She achieved tech celebrity when the original song was used to test the encoding algorithm for mp3s, as the a cappella vocals were particularly unforgiving of compression.
In the decade since this conversation, the song has lost none of its popularity. Fall Out Boy kicked off “Centuries” with the four-note refrain. Giorgio Moroder recorded a cover with full-on Midnight Express synth overload and glassy vocals from Britney Spears (and a video that relocates the action to a neon-graphic California). The British electronic jazz outfit Portico Quartet snuck the riff, its swing damped down, into Art in the Age of Automation.
Still, the person who sings it most is Vega. She performed it in 2012 at the Barbican in London for the 25th anniversary of the album, Alison Balsom’s trumpet blurts doing the work of the beats, a performance captured on a live album. “I really like all the repetition that goes with singing and telling stories on stage,” she told me. “So I’m in the right business for myself. I have ways of getting myself to stay interested in the song.”
What are your memories of ‘Tom’s Diner’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); Virgin UK; Polydor Associated Labels; Liphone Records; Columbia; Virgin EMI; Giorgio Moroder Music LCC; Gondwana Records; Concert Live Ltd
Picture credit: Bernd Muller/Redferns