The Mysterious Happenings and Remixes at “Tom’s Diner” | Music Video Review | Dissect DJs

#TomsDiner #podcast #reaction Episode 148 of the Dissect DJs podcast takes us to the mysterious, melodic world that exists in Tom's Diner, as laid out by Suzanne Vega in 1987. What is Tom's Diner? Does anything happen there? And why does it sound so magical? This song has been reworked countless times, and we go through as many of them as we can, some of them are memorable, some…

https://ryancastleyt.wordpress.com/2025/10/16/the-mysterious-happenings-and-remixes-at-toms-diner-music-video-review-dissect-djs/

書いた。

Suzanne Vega 『Solitude Standing (孤独-ひとり-)』〜「Tom's Diner」 カテドラル･カスィ(th -θ-)ドラル〜｜有須悟史@『根無し草のつれづれ note版』 #note

#孤独
#DNA
#カテドラル
#SuzanneVega
#スザンヌ・ヴェガ
#CATHEDRAL
#thの発音
#SolitudeStanding
#TomsDiner
#トムズダイナー

https://note.com/jolly_guppy7749/n/n6f4927cc70f1

Whoever composed this clearly chose an excellent song to sample. I love what came out of it!

IVE - Attitude
https://youtu.be/38xYeot-ciM

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner (1981)
https://youtu.be/j4jtIDaeaWI

#kpop #IVE #NewRelease #Attitude #SuzanneVega #TomSDiner #music

Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner (Acapella Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mto47BMT3yA

#SuzanneVega #TomsDiner #Acapella #Music

This is such a great cover of Tom's Diner.

“It is always nice to see you.” 🥰

https://youtu.be/5r3B7yz6J68?si=sZ0WnWgKws_PFyXS #music #tomsdiner

How "Tom's Diner" Tuned the MP3

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/19727/how-toms-diner-tuned-mp3

#TomsDiner #SuzanneVega #MP3

Today we are talking one of modern music's most interesting and unique songs, "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega.. Not only was this song set in the same restaurant as the one in "Seinfeld" but its unusual performance style helped lead to a scientific breakthrough in audio technology that changed everything! Enjoy.

Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes…Song #63/250: Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega https://tommacinneswriter.com/2024/06/13/readers-choice-toms-top-tunessong-63-250-toms-diner-by-suzanne-vega/ #DNA #MP3, #ReadersChoice/TomsTopTunes, #SuzanneVega, #TomsDiner, #TomsRestaurant

It is easy to look at the early days of Suzanne Vega’s adult years as being a Bohemian dream. In the early 1980s she was enrolled at a liberal arts college in Manhattan called Barnard College. She was majoring in English. Between classes, she wrote poetry and participated in writers’ groups that eventually evolved into coffeehouse folk music sessions on open mic nights throughout the city. While working on her writing and her school work, Vega would frequent a restaurant called Tom’s Restaurant. This is the restaurant made famous in the Seinfeld comedy show. While inside this real restaurant, alone with her creative thoughts, Vega would take note of the patrons who came and went, creating characters out of them based on their fashion, their mannerisms, the interactions they had with the staff and with each other and so on. Not far from Tom’s Restaurant is a church known as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In front of that cathedral is a series of large stone steps. Many people use those steps to stop and rest from the hustle and bustle of walking in such a busy city. For Vega, she used those steps as a rendezvous point where she and her boyfriend would meet. They would have picnics and sip wine at midnight under the glow of whatever moonlight happened to filter down to street level. Together, they would talk about the purity of poetry and of Art and the corrupting influence of wealth and commerce upon the creative process. It was all a very heady and idealistic time in her life. 

It was also a time when Vega decided that she wanted to try to turn some of her poetry into song lyrics and perhaps try to record some songs. She took to trying out her original material during her coffeehouse sessions. While Vega was by no means becoming a star, she did start to develop a bit of a name for herself in local folk circles. Not long afterwards, she was offered the chance to record some of her songs on an album. That self-titled debut album was released in 1985. Due to the groundwork that she had laid on the coffeehouse circuit, her album ended up in the hands of some music critics from influential New York publications. Her album failed to generate any hit songs, but it did earn Vega some positive reviews from those music critics. Armed with those reviews and the confidence that they inspired, Suzanne Vega began work on a follow up album. All the while this was happening, she and her boyfriend began finding themselves more at odds with each other. While Vega had certainly not become rich from sales of her debut album, she was earning a modest income. In addition, she hired a manager and started having to think in terms of the business of making music her career. This change in mindset led to a breakup with her boyfriend. After this happened, Suzanne Vega found herself feeling a sense of disconnect from the world around her. As she continued to visit places like Tom’s Restaurant, she began to view the world there differently. Those same customers who once were merely characters in her poems took on new meaning. As she watched them, she felt a sense of alienation taking hold of her. Her observations took on a sharper focus as she watched who actually spoke to whom, who sat alone in silence, which people were always looking wistfully out of the window at a world that didn’t include them and so on. It is easy to be alone among the crowd. So many people around her seemed to be on their own, either by choice or by circumstance. And now she was like them, too. Channeling that feeling of solitude into music resulted in a song being written called “Tom’s Diner”. It was originally going to be called “Tom’s Restaurant” in tribute to the place that had become like a second home to her and those around her, but in the end, she thought that the word “Diner” sounded better, so the song became “Tom’s Diner”.

In 1987, Vega had put together enough material for a new album that became known as Solitude Standing. The songs on this album reflected a growing sense of maturity in Vega’s writing. A sense of social consciousness began to appear in the form of her first single, “Luka”. This song was about child abuse as told from the perspective of the child being abused. In later years, Suzanne Vega admitted that the song was inspired by her own life. However, when “Luka” was released, the message that child abuse was an experience that scarred its victims and, furthermore, was an experience for which children were not to blame became something of a social phenomenon. It was a song that caused victims who had previously suffered in silence to finally feel heard and seen. The national conversations that arose regarding the nature of how child abuse happens and what can be done about it changed the lives of many people who had being bearing the weight of guilt and shame their whole lives. The song also made a star out of Suzanne Vega. The followup single to “Luka” was “Tom’s Diner”.

“Tom’s Diner” holds a unique place in the history of modern music for several reasons. First of all, Suzanne Vega decided to write the lyrics of this song as she would a poem. Furthermore, when she thought about how best to perform this song, she felt that since it was written like a poem that she should deliver it like one. Thus, “Tom’s Diner” is sung almost as a spoken word poem and is delivered completely a capella. After this song was released, it became almost as big a hit as “Luka”, making it one of the most successful a capella songs in music history. As people grew familiar with the content and cadence of “Tom’s Diner”, Vega began to notice a curious trend appear during her live shows. For all of her other songs, the audience would be chatty and would dance and sway to her music as she sang. However, when it came time for the opening notes of “Tom’s Diner”, the crowd would still and become silent as if under a spell. To this day, whenever Suzanne Vega has performed “Tom’ Diner” at some of the world’s largest music festivals such as Glastonbury and Coachella, the crowd always stills and listens hard. A sense of calm envelops them as Vega reads/sings her story of how it was to sit in Tom’s Restaurant all those years ago watching so many people she came to know so well yet never spoke to, going about their lives, alone in one of the most populated cities on earth.

Solitude Standing became an album that sold millions of copies.  It helped Suzanne Vega to become a household name in the music business. But a funny thing happened because of the song “Tom’s Diner” that helped solidify that song as one of the most special songs of all time, and it didn’t really involve Suzanne Vega at all. The world of audio technology was evolving all through the 1980s, just as Suzanne Vega’s career was evolving, too. The 1980s was the time period when the ability to digitize sound was becoming more refined and commonplace and, most importantly, more economical to produce on a mass scale. Without going into a detailed scientific explanation, the evolution of audio engineering that took us from record albums to cassette tapes and on to digital compact discs involved something known as sound compression. In order to be able to reproduce sounds in smaller physical properties such as computer processors, engineers had to figure out a way to compress sounds in a way to make them fit in a smaller area yet still retain the full breadth and depth of the original sound. Along the way, an audio engineer named Karlheinz Brandenburg was attempting to create a new audio compression system that ended up becoming known as MP3 technology. MP3 technology was what led to things such as iPod Shuffles and other portable listening devices becoming a thing. In any case, as Brandenburg was trying to fine tune his audio compression design, he happened to hear “Tom’s Diner” playing in a room adjacent to where he was working. The crystal clear clarity of Suzanne Vega’s voice on this song had previously been used to test drive high end speakers for home stereo systems. Brandenburg wondered how the audio quality would sound after being processed through his MP3 system. Once he played “Tom’s DIner”, he found that his MP3 technology made it sound awful. By tweaking his own design to make “Tom’s Diner” sound wonderful again, Brandenburg discovered that his system now worked for all other songs, too. Thus, “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega is credited with being the song that launched MP3 technology, that, in turn, changed the way in which all of us potentially interact with our music.

Solitude Standing has turned out to be the highwater mark in terms of sales for Suzanne Vega. But that hasn’t stopped her from touring and singing and bringing people together because of her words. She is always good to support causes related to social justice and the environment, as well as numerous issues termed “women’s issues”. Vega has also collaborated several times with one of my favourite singers, Joe Jackson (who you can read more about here). However, the most recent wave of success that she has achieved came from her old song, “Tom’s Diner”, and again, it had little to do with her. A new band that called themselves DNA remixed  “Tom’s Diner” and mashed it together with the song “Keep On Movin’” by Soul II Soul and created a dance hit from Vega’s original a capella rendering. As seems to be becoming a trend, modern artists reaching back into the music vaults of the 1980s for inspiration has resulted in Suzanne Vega’s career being placed in the social media spotlight of an entirely new generation of music fans. Just like with Kate Bush and “Running Up That Hill”, “Tom’s Diner” has been given a new lease on life thanks to DNA.

And so we come to the end of a post about a song that describes what it is like to feel alone while watching the world pass by from within the confines of one of America’s most recognizable cultural touchstones, Tom’s Restaurant. This song, initially about alienation, has ended up endearing Suzanne Vega to the world in more ways than she could have possibly imagined. For me, it is also another clear example of trusting your own instincts. She charted her own course in life, refusing to stay with a boyfriend who would have been satisfied if she had limited herself to singing in coffeehouses for the money in tip jars. Suzanne Vega understood the power of poetry and refused to alter the structure of her song to make it more verse-chorus, verse-chorus style as many pop songs are. Finally, Vega could have recorded “Tom’s Diner” with a band, as I’m sure was suggested to her at the time. But she stuck to her guns and insisted that a capella was the way for that song to be properly sung. As a result, the clarity and cadence of her spoken word song/poem was viewed as being perfect to help design a sound compression system that helped usher in the era of portable audio devices, and it acted as the foundation for a very successful dance remix. All because Suzanne Vega trusted her own instincts. There is such a lesson in all of that for the rest of us. Stay true to your vision. Trust your gut. The purity of art is what comes from possessing a mindset such as that.

The link to the official website for Suzanne Vega can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “Tom’s Diner” by Suzanne Vega can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to a video for the song “Tom’s Diner” as remixed by DNA can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to a video that explains how the song “Tom’s Diner” helped to create the MP3 sound compression system can be found here. ***This short video is more interesting than you might think. Check it out. 🙂

***As always, all original content contained within this post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2024 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com

https://tommacinneswriter.com/2024/06/13/readers-choice-toms-top-tunessong-63-250-toms-diner-by-suzanne-vega/

#DNA #KarlheinzBrandenburg #MP3 #ReadersChoiceTomsTopTunes #SuzanneVega #TomsDiner #TomsRestaurant