Suzanne Vega didn’t set out to change the music business. But by the end of the 1980s, the New York singer-songwriter had done exactly that in two very different ways.
Her success helped convince a record industry dominated by male executives that a woman with an acoustic guitar and a notebook full of original songs could be a major commercial success. Then, almost by accident, her voice on “Tom’s Diner” became an important tool in the development of a technology that would transform the way the world listened to music.
Vega had risen through New York’s folk-music scene before breaking through with her second album, the platinum-selling Solitude Standing in 1987. The record produced her signature U.S. Top 5 hit, “Luka,” and her success helped open the door for a new generation of women singer-songwriters.
“I think I was perceived as someone who had opened the door for women’s success,” Vega tells Guitar Player. “I think I showed the businessmen that this was a template that would work. And they saw that with Tracy Chapman, and then they saw that with all these other wonderful dynamic women, like Sinéad O’Connor and many that came out in the ’90s. And it continues today. There are so many women making all kinds of music and I think that’s the way it should have always been.”
At the time, much of the music business still regarded a woman writing her own songs and accompanying herself on guitar as an anomaly. Vega remembers being regarded as a novelty because she played guitar and wrote her own songs.
“When I was up and coming, a lot of people sort of thought that it was odd to have women playing guitars,” she says. “They thought of it as a ’70s movement or something, so I was still considered a novelty because I played guitar and wrote my own songs. Everyone thought of me as being both retro and futuristic. And I thought this was nonsense. Why shouldn’t women play the guitar and write songs? And of course, all these women before me had already been doing it.”
In 1989, Vega became the first woman to headline the long-running Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. The occasion was marred by a death threat from a stalker that prompted police to insist she wear a bulletproof vest for the performance.
“I was happy to be headlining Glastonbury Festival, but I certainly did not enjoy that whole drama that was going on backstage,” she recalls. “That was totally unexpected, but fortunately, it all ended fine. It all dissipated. The next day, it was never repeated. The threat stopped, and we were able to all go on with our lives.”
But Vega’s influence would soon extend far beyond the artists who followed her.
“Tom’s Diner,” the spare a cappella song that opened Solitude Standing in 1987, had been only a minor hit when it was released as a single in Europe that year, reaching number 58 in the U.K. Its stripped-down arrangement, however, made Vega’s voice unusually exposed — and that would prove significant a few years later.
In the early 1990s, German electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg was working on technology that would allow digital audio files to be compressed dramatically while retaining as much of their perceived sound quality as possible. He used the a cappella recording of “Tom’s Diner” as a reference while testing and refining the technology, helping make the song part of the story behind the development of the MP3 format.
Vega was eventually dubbed “the mother of the MP3.”
“I didn’t know what to make of it at first,” Vega says. “When I was told this story, I thought, what the heck is an MP3? But in the end, I am sort of tickled that I am part of history in a sense, that they used my voice to refine this thing called the MP3.
“I eventually met Karlheinz Brandenburg, and he’s a lovely man, very funny, and kind of a mad scientist type of person. And so, I enjoy that I have a role in history, and a small role in the technology of music.”
When she followed Solitude Standing with Days of Open Hand in 1990, Vega had the budget and freedom that came with a successful album. Rather than replicate the formula of its predecessor, she and her collaborators took a more experimental approach. The record received good reviews but failed to match the commercial impact of Solitude Standing.
“First of all, any formula you think is going to work, it’s not going to,” Vega says. “People give you advice and say, ‘Oh, here’s how it’s done.’ And the fact is that it’s all kind of the Wild West. You just have to do what works.
“After Solitude Standing was a big hit, I had a big budget and lots of time to make the follow-up album. And we worked really hard on that album probably for a whole year, getting every guitar part squeaky clean, and spending so much time looking at everything with a fine-toothed comb. And the album in the end did okay.”
Ironically, the song that made the biggest commercial impact that year was not on Days of Open Hand at all. British production duo DNA turned Vega’s a cappella “Tom’s Diner” into a dance track and scored a major hit.
“The thing that really did well in 1990 was this remake of ‘Tom’s Diner’ by two boys in a studio who had very little money, but had just a brilliant idea,” explains Vega. “They put together this funky remix of ‘Tom’s Diner’ on a weekend! And that was the thing that hit big that year.
“My album got pretty good reviews, but it didn’t hit the way that their version of ‘Tom’s Diner’ did. This taught me that all the good intentions and all the money and all the time that you put into something isn’t always the thing. The thing is the idea. Does the idea connect with an audience?
“And so that was a big learning point for me. I learned to trust my instincts more. So, the 99.9F° album, which came after both ‘Tom’s Diner’ and Days of Open Hand, was much wilder and much freer and was just a lot more fun. And I think that’s one of the most important things I learned.”
