![]() I said 'OK, let's test what this song does to my sound system, to MP3'. In a 2009 documentary about the history of the song by Swedish SVT, Brandenburg said: "I was finishing my PhD thesis, and then I was reading some hi-fi magazine and found that they had used this song to test loudspeakers. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice." He recalled: "I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm.somewhere down the corridor, a radio was playing 'Tom's Diner.' I was electrified. ![]() 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.ĭuring the 2006 Major League Baseball season, Cincinnati Reds player Ryan Freel used this song as his entrance song when he came to bat.Īn article in the now defunct magazine Business 2.0 revealed that "Tom's Diner" was also used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the audio compression scheme known as MP3 at what is now the Fraunhofer Society. Vega conceived "Tom's Diner" as a piece for voice and solo piano. Vega has acknowledged that "Tom's Diner" is a composite of events, and that the rain was from a morning she remembered being in the diner during the spring of 1982, after the initial events of the song. On that day in New York, however, the weather was not rainy, but overcast. ![]() In a 2008 essay for The New York Times, Vega confirmed that Holden was the actor whose death she had read about and inspired the line in the song. He had died from a fall at his apartment, suffered after drinking excessively. Only two newspapers in New York City carried comic strips, or "funnies", in 19, and only one, the New York Post, featured a front-page story of the death of Oscar-winning actor William Holden, whose body was discovered on Monday, November 16, 1981. The lyrics refer to a rainy morning, when she was at the diner on the corner, reading in her newspaper of "a story of an actor / who had died while he was drinking", and afterwards "turning to the horoscope / and looking for the funnies". Vega said that she wrote the song in 1982 Brian Rose has said that it was written sometime between mid-1981 and mid-1982. "Tom's Diner Day": The date of the composition Īn article on Suzanne Vega's official website uses clues in the song to determine the exact date that Vega wrote it. John the Divine, located one block to the east. The "bells of the cathedral" that she remarks hearing in the song are those of the Cathedral of St. She attempted to think and write in this fashion (including a male perspective ) while sitting at Tom's Restaurant. Vega wrote the song based on a comment by her friend Brian Rose, a photographer, who mentioned that in his work, he sometimes felt as if "he saw his whole life through a pane of glass, and like he was the witness to a lot of things, but was never really involved in them". At the end of the song, the narrator leaves the diner to catch the train after the coffee is finished. The ringing of bells at a nearby cathedral causes the narrator to reminisce about an unnamed companion and a midnight picnic. The song mentions reading a newspaper as well as seeing two women, one who enters the diner and one who stands outside in the rain. ![]() The song begins with the narrator stopping at a diner for a cup of coffee. The diner later became famous as the location used for the exterior scenes of Monk's Café in the popular 1990s television sitcom Seinfeld. Singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega was reputedly a frequent patron during the early 1980s when she was a student at nearby Barnard College. The "Tom's Diner" of the song is Tom's Restaurant in New York City, a mid-20th-century diner on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street.
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