Сюзанна Вега және "Томның кафесі" туралы

1987 single by Suzanne Vega

"Tom's Diner" is a song by American singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega. Written on November 18, 1981, it was first released 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 British group DNA in 1990, which reached No. 1 in Austria, Germany, Greece and Switzerland. The song is known for its use in testing various digital compression schemes during the development of the MP3, earning Vega the title of "Mother of the MP3". a mid 20th century diner on the northeast corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. Singer and 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. uses clues in the song to determine the exact date that Vega wrote it. Vega said that she wrote the song in 1982; Brian Rose has said that it was written sometime between mid 1981 and mid 1982. 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". Only two newspapers in New York City carried comic strips, or "funnies", in 1981 and 1982, 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. 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.

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. During the 2006 Major League Baseball season, Cincinnati Reds player Ryan Freel used this song as his entrance song when he came to bat.

"Tom's Diner" was used by the researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg as a reference in developing the MP3 audio compression scheme. 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. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice." 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 said 'OK, let's test what this song does to my sound system, to MP3'. And the result was, at bit rates where everything else sounded quite nice, Suzanne Vega's voice sounded horrible." Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time he refined the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of Vega's voice. While the MP3 compression format is not specifically tuned to play the song "Tom's Diner" (an assortment of critically analyzed material was involved in the design of the codec over many years), among audio engineers this anecdote has earned Vega the informal title "The Mother of the MP3".

In 1990, two British record producers under the name DNA remixed "Tom's Diner", grafting Vega's vocals onto a dance beat from 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. and DNA, who conducted the transaction through intermediaries without revealing their true identities. Vega told a British columnist, "(A&M) asked me what I thought of it and I told them it was really kind of nice. So I said, 'Go ahead and release it.' I wasn't expecting it to be successful—I never thought it would be that popular. It just seemed very charming." Vega's vocals span from F3 to E4 in the song.

American rock band Fall Out Boy used an interpolation of "Tom's Diner" in their song "Centuries". In 2022, music duo Sofi Tukker sampled the song on their single "Summer in New York".