Suzanne Nadine Vega is an American singer-songwriter of folk-inspired music. Vega's music career spans 40 years.
In the mid-1980s and 1990s, she released four singles that entered the Top 40 on the UK singles chart, "Marlene on the Wall", "Left of Center", "Luka" and "No Cheap Thrill".
real name: Suzanne Nadine Peck Vega Yunqué
labels: Blue Note, A&M Records, Fast Folk, Cooking Vinyl
genres: alternative rock
plays: guitar, voice
Facts from Wikidata and Discogs, free to use.
Suzanne Nadine Vega was born on July 11, 1959, in Santa Monica, California. Her parents divorced soon after her birth. Her mother, Pat Vega (née Schumacher), is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of English, Irish and Scottish origin. Her stepfather, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, also known as Ed Vega, was a novelist and professor from Puerto Rico. When Vega was two and a half, her family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. She was not aware that Peck was her biological father until she was nine years old. Vega and Peck met for the first time in her late 20s and remain in contact.
"Tom's Diner" is a song by American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Written in 1981 or 1982, it was first included as a track on the January 1984 issue of Fast Folk Musical Magazine.
Originally featured on her second studio album, Solitude Standing (1987), it was released as a single in Europe only in 1987 following the success of her single "Luka". It was later used as the basis for a remix by the English electronic music producers DNA in 1990, which reached No. 1 in Austria, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
The "Tom's Diner" of the song is Tom's Restaurant in Manhattan, New York City, a mid-20th-century diner on the northeast corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega was reputedly a frequent patron during the early 1980s when she was a student at nearby Barnard College. The diner later became famous as the location used for the exterior scenes of Monk's Café in the popular 1990s television sitcom Seinfeld.
An article on Suzanne Vega's official website uses clues in the song to determine the exact date that Vega wrote it.
Vega conceived "Tom's Diner" as a piece for voice and solo piano. Two versions feature on her album Solitude Standing; the album opens with an a cappella version, and closes with an instrumental version played on keyboards, with guitars lending support.
In 1990, two English record producers under the name DNA remixed "Tom's Diner", grafting Vega's vocals onto a dance beat from British musical collective Soul II Soul ("Keep On Movin'") and turning her simple ad-libbed outro – "Do do do uh, do da-do uh" – into the song's driving hook. At the time, it was impossible to get a whole song into a sampler, so they spent evenings and weekends cutting Vega's vocals into little bits. Without permission from Vega, her record label, or publisher, the duo released the remix on a limited basis for distribution to clubs as "Oh Suzanne" by "DNA featuring Suzanne Vega". Vega's record company of the time, A&M, arranged to release the remix rather than take DNA to court for copyright infringement.