Suzanne Vega: Mother of the MP3 and Tom's Diner

In high school, my best friend Amy liked to give me mix tapes, and it was cool because her taste was different from my parents'. I remember Tom's Diner was on one of them. This is a witty, multifaceted account by Suzanne Vega on writing that song and how it became the audio test case for the MP3 specification (which frequencies to eliminate so as to compress files for online sharing).

There's so much good stuff in the essay, but I also liked hearing her thoughts about composing the song. It goes to show that the things songwriters use as jumping off points are often completely invisible to the listener. Which is really an indicator that craft matters. Here's the song's history:

I have a photographer friend, Brian Rose, who has taken pictures of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Berlin Wall. He told me once long ago that he felt as though he saw the world through a pane of glass. This struck me as romantic and alienated, and I wanted to write a song from this viewpoint.

I had been taking classes at Barnard with titles like “The Dramatic Monologue.” I was in Tom’s and I thought it would be fun to write a song that was like a little film, where the main character sees all these things but can’t respond to any of it unless it relates to him directly. The part about the actor dying was true — it was William Holden. Some fans recently looked up the day he died and named the next day Tom’s Diner Day. (In addition, see here.) I made up the part about the woman who was fixing her stockings.

The part where I sing about the “midnight picnic” is from an actual picnic I had with the songwriter Jack Hardy on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine one night.

The melody hit me as I was walking down Broadway, fast. I wanted something jaunty. I remember liking the near rhymes of “diner” and “corner,” “sitting” and “waiting.” Although it is actually Tom’s restaurant I changed it to diner as it sings better that way.

I was imagining it as a kind of French film soundtrack, something vaudevillian on piano, like a background to a Truffaut film. But I didn’t play piano and didn’t know anybody who did. So I kept it a cappella, and began to sing it this way in my live show. This detail, singing the song alone with no accompaniment, affected everything to come.

I noticed right away, at my shows, that whenever I opened my mouth and sang, “I am sitting, in the morning…”, people would stop drinking and talking, and immediately whirl around and stare at the stage. So I used it as an opening song. I can’t think of a single time that this didn’t work. Even at the Prince’s Trust concert in 1986, in front of 10,000 people, I went onstage as the opening act and began the entire concert with that song — and it worked!