Suzanne Nadine Vega (born July 11, 1959) is an American songwriter and singer known for her eclectic folk-inspired music.
Two of Vega's songs (both from her second album Solitude Standing, 1987) reached the top 10 of various international chart listings: "Luka" and "Tom's Diner". The latter was originally an a cappella version on Vega's album, which was then remade in 1990 as a dance track produced by the British dance production team DNA.
Suzanne Vega was born July 11, 1959 in Santa Monica, California. Her mother, Pat Vega, is a computer systems analyst of German-Swedish heritage. Her father, Richard Peck, is of Scottish-English-Irish extraction. They divorced soon after her birth. Her stepfather, Ed Vega, also known as Edgardo Vega Yunque, was a writer and teacher from Puerto Rico.
When Suzanne was two and a half, the family moved to New York City. She grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side. At the age of nine she began to write poetry; she wrote her first song at age fourteen. Later she attended New York's prestigious High School of Performing Arts (now called LaGuardia High School). There she studied modern dance and graduated in 1977.
While majoring in English literature at Barnard College, she performed in small venues in Greenwich Village, where she was a regular contributor to Jack Hardy's Monday night songwriters' group at the Cornelia Street Cafe and had some of her first songs published on Fast Folk anthology albums. In 1984, she received a major label recording contract, making her one of the first Fast Folk artists to break out on a major label.
Vega's self-titled debut album was released in 1985 and was well-received by critics in the U.S.;[4] it reached platinum status in the United Kingdom. Produced by Lenny Kaye and Steve Addabbo, the songs feature Vega's acoustic guitar in straightforward arrangements. A video was released for the album's song "Marlene on the Wall", which went into MTV and VH1's rotations. During this period Vega also wrote lyrics for two songs on Songs from Liquid Days by composer Philip Glass.
Her next effort, Solitude Standing (1987), garnered critical and commercial success including two hit singles: "Tom's Diner" and "Luka", the latter of which was an international success. "Luka" is written about, and from the point of view of, an abused child—at the time an uncommon subject for a pop hit. While continuing a focus on Vega's acoustic guitar, the music is more strongly pop-oriented and features fuller arrangements. The a cappella "Tom's Diner" was later a hit again, remixed by two British dance producers under the name DNA, in 1990. The track was originally a bootleg, until Vega allowed DNA to release through her record company, and it became her all-time biggest hit.
Suzanne Vega's song "Tom's Diner" was used as the reference track in an early trial of the MP3 compression system, earning her the distinction of being the Mother of the MP3. It was chosen because her a cappella vocal with relatively little reverberation was used as the model for Karlheinz Brandenburg's compression algorithm. Brandenburg heard “Tom's Diner” on a radio playing the song. He was excited and at first convinced it would be “nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice.”
"Tom's Diner" takes place in Tom's Restaurant at 112th Street and Broadway in New York City. Exterior shots of the same restaurant appear in the television sitcom Seinfeld as Monk's, which is the eatery where Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer hang out. The DNA remix of the track was so popular that it inspired many cover versions—the best of which were eventually collected by Vega on an album titled Tom's Album. A variant of this version was the inspiration of a remixed version of Julee Cruise's "Rocking back inside My Heart". Nick at Nite did a remake of the song in the mid-1990s for a commercial advertising I Dream of Jeannie, in which the chorus is set to the theme from the show. The remixed version of "Tom's Diner" was later sampled by hip hop artist Nikki D in her hit single titled "Daddy's Little Girl", the title track of her debut album. Rapper Tupac Shakur sampled the track in "Dopefiend's Diner".
"Luka" was covered by The Lemonheads on the 1989 album Lick, shortly before the band was signed by Atlantic Records, and was a minor college-airplay hit. On a 1987 Swedish television special, Vega said this about the song "Luka":
“ A few years ago, I used to see this group of children playing in front of my building, and there was one of them, whose name was Luka, who seemed a little bit distinctive from the other children. I always remembered his name, and I always remembered his face, and I didn't know much about him, but he just seemed set apart from these other children that I would see playing. And his character is what I based the song Luka on. In the song, the boy Luka is an abused child — in real life I don't think he was. I think he was just different. ”
Also, in an ASCAP interview, she responded to a question about "Luka":
“ Interviewer: When you can touch so many people with songs like "Luka", it must be pretty rewarding.
Vega: Yeah. It’s an amazing feeling. Especially since that particular song is a very special song. It’s a song about child abuse, so therefore it does touch a lot of people in a different way than if it were, say, a love song or some other kind of song.
Vega's third album, Days of Open Hand (1990) continued in the style of her first two albums.
In 1992 she released the album 99.9F°. It consists of a mixture of folk music, dance beats and industrial music.
Her fifth album, Nine Objects of Desire, was released in 1996. The music varies between a frugal, simple style and the industrial production of 99.9F°. This album contains "Caramel", featured in the movie The Truth About Cats & Dogs and, later, the trailer for the movie Closer. A song not included on that album, "Woman on the Tier", was featured on the soundtrack of the movie Dead Man Walking.
In 1997 she took a singing part on the concept album Heaven and Hell, a musical interpretation of the Seven deadly sins by her colleague Joe Jackson, with whom she had already collaborated in 1986 on "Left of Center" from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack (with Vega singing and Jackson playing piano).
Retrieved from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Vega
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