Suzanne Vega
When Karlheinz Brandenburg was busy inventing the MP3 – a way of compressing music into a teeny-tiny audio file – he chose Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega to perfect his creation, declaring it would be ‘nearly impossible to compress this warm voice’.
It’s not surprising that Brandenburg (who succeeded, by the way) was so charmed by the New York singer-songwriter’s mellifluous tones. While most performers love to show off their vibrato and vocal gymnastics, the gentle, unfussy purity of Vega’s voice is a balm for the ears.
‘I started singing to get my little brothers and sister to sleep, and I still sing that way,’ says Vega. ‘I’m actually asthmatic, I don’t have a lot of breath, so that explains some of my singing style. It’s short and to the point, and I’ve come to like it.’
The 59-year-old visits the UK next month as part of a worldwide tour, and Tom’s Diner will undoubtedly be on the set list.
With its fiendishly catchy ‘do-do-do-do’ refrain, the original a capella version was recorded in 1987 as an album track – but when British act DNA remixed it with a punchy dance beat three years later, it became a global sensation.
‘It was really cool, and I thought it would be a nice dance club hit, but I did not expect it to be a worldwide hit,’ says Vega. ‘It was a song about being alienated at breakfast, and it’s turned into this crazy party song.’
Inevitably people sing ‘do-do-do-do’ at her in the street, but she doesn’t join in. ‘I just nod and smile and wave and carry on,’ she says, with a wry laugh.
Growing up in Spanish Harlem with her mother, a computer systems analyst, and her Puerto Rican stepfather, the writer Ed Vega, nobody would have guessed that the shy young girl would ever become a performer.
‘I was very introverted – I still am, to be honest,’ she admits. ‘I find it exhausting to constantly interact with people, and the way that I recharge is to just go off and be by myself. As a child I was considered aloof.’
Music was always playing in the family home, but Vega didn’t pick up the guitar until she was 11. ‘My stepfather played, and he’d written this beautiful song for my brother, Matthew, and I got my own couple of lines in the song. This seemed really magical to me, that you could create this world that was real but not real, and I thought to myself “I want to do that. I want to write songs.”’
It took her three years to complete her first attempt – also about Matthew – ‘because I was very fussy and picky. I sang it for my stepfather when I was 14, and he said “Suzie has a voice!” I felt like a million bucks.’
At New York’s famous High School of Performing Arts, Vega excelled at ballet, art and music. ‘I wanted to be some kind of artist, but I didn’t know what,’ she recalls. ‘So I just tried different things until one of them stuck.’
The one that stuck was songwriting. She performed her first gig at a coffee house aged 16, ‘and I was so nervous I shouted my way through the whole thing. I was just learning how to use a microphone, which was thrilling to me because I have a very small voice.
‘But my teachers said that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a performer. That I thought a lot, and maybe I should be a scholar instead.’
She duly won a scholarship to study English Literature at New York’s Barnard College, and didn’t sing again for nearly two years. ‘I felt disappointed, I felt discouraged. But eventually I started to perform in college, and I got a really good response, so when I graduated I thought “This is really what I want to do”.’
Armed with her guitar, Vega began to gig regularly, ‘and I worked up the courage to go down to Greenwich Village, to the clubs where Bob Dylan had played. Before that I was too shy and too nervous and felt unworthy, so it really took a lot of guts to cross that line.’
Her self-titled first album was released in 1985, and the storytelling lyrics – about New York, about ordinary people – were disarmingly different. Her record company hoped to sell 30,000 copies. They sold a million.
How did she cope with the fame? ‘I’ve been lucky that people know my name and voice, but they almost never know exactly what I look like,’ she says. ‘I look different in real life than I do in photos, and aside from the occasional person singing Tom’s Diner at me, most people don’t really know if it’s me or not.’
Vega went on to pen many memorable songs, including Marlene on the Wall and Left of Center, but it was the haunting Luka – a song about child abuse – that struck the deepest chord. It’s the track she’s asked to perform more than any other, and insists she never tires of it.
‘Abuse happens all the time, but back then it wasn’t always in the papers, so I felt I wanted to write about it,’ says Vega, who based the fictional Luka on an oddball nine-year-old who lived in her apartment building. ‘I’ve had so many letters over the years, and there’s always one or two people in the audience that came specifically to hear that song, because it’s meaningful to them. So I never just walk through it, I always sing it with my whole heart.’
Twice married – the second time to lawyer Paul Mills, a boyfriend from her early 20s who she reconnected with in 2005 – mother-of-one Vega turns 60 next summer, and has no plans to stop writing and performing. And, with more than seven million album sales under her belt, there’s little chance her fans would let her.
‘I love my career, I love the responses that I get, and I’m always interested to see who shows up at the audiences,’ she says. ‘It’s always this mixture of people my own age, people much younger, families… I see all kinds of people there, and I feel well-loved in the world.’
Suzanne Vega tours the UK in August; see myticket.co.uk
An edited version of this feature appeared in Waitrose Weekend in July 2018. (c) Waitrose