Suzanne Vega became world famous with sad folk songs like “Tom’s Diner” and “Luka” – and even became the “mother of the MP3”. Today the US singer turns 65 – and continues to tour the world.
Suzanne Vega once forgot the lyrics to one of her most famous hits at a free concert in New York’s Madison Square Park. She was just about to start the second verse of “Luka” when the US singer, who turns 65 today on July 11, faltered. “I’ve sung this song 18 million times, but somehow I can’t remember the words. But you probably know them, so please help me out.”
Immediately, fans shouted the beginning of the second verse of one of her most famous songs and Vega continued playing, accompanied by the audience clapping and cheering. Vega thanked them with a compliment: “I love playing in my hometown. I play all over the world, but it’s just the most beautiful here.”
In the 1980s, Vega emerged as a young woman on the city’s folk-pop scene, with a guitar and sad songs – “Tom’s Diner” or “Luka”, a song about child abuse from the victim’s perspective that nevertheless became a worldwide hit. It still happens to her that she “goes into a drugstore, asks for a skin cream, the salesperson looks at me with a grin – and starts whistling “Luka”, says Vega. “That’s probably the price you have to pay when dreams come true.”
With “Tom’s Diner” to the “mother of the MP3”
With “Tom’s Diner”, Vega became the “mother of the MP3”: The song from 1982 is about a stay at the still existing “Tom’s Restaurant” in Manhattan, where large parts of the series “Seinfeld” were later filmed. She often ate there or drank coffee, says Vega. “It’s not cute or atmospheric. It’s just plain, that’s why I like it.” Due to its sound quality, many musicians later used the song to test their speakers – and at the end of the 80s, engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen saved “Tom’s Diner” as the first song ever in MP3 technology.
The acapella version of the song presented the engineers with the challenge of compressing the human voice without any loss of sound. Thanks to its small size, the format allows music to be downloaded from the Internet in a short time. The first attempt with “Tom’s Diner” sounded “as if someone was scratching the left and right ear,” said inventor Karlheinz Brandenburg when Vega stopped by the institute in Erlangen in 2007.
Breakthrough with second album
Vega was born in 1959 as Suzanne Peck in Los Angeles, but just one year after her birth her mother moved with her to New York. Vega grew up in Manhattan and began writing poems and songs at an early age and performing in small music clubs. “I’ve always felt that I knew myself pretty well and didn’t really struggle with trying to get a certain image.” She got her first record deal in the early 1980s and made her breakthrough with her second album – “Solitude Standing” – in 1987.
Since then, Vega has not always been able to build on the success of this album, which contained both “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner” – but the singer, who is married for the second time and has a grown-up daughter, has never seemed to be interested in hits anyway. The award-winning musician prefers to do her own thing and, for example, writes songs based on the work of the US author Carson McCullers (1917-1967).
Many fans are loyal to her – and grateful that the singer continues to tour a lot. This summer, immediately after her birthday, she will begin a European tour that will also take her to Marburg, Kulmbach and Freiburg, and she plans to continue touring the USA in the fall.
Source: Stern
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
