New York singer Suzanne Vega’s second album from 1987 features two of her biggest hits: Tom’s diner and Luka. The story about Tom’s diner is a curious one. It was originally released on a promotional cd for Fast Folk Musical Magazine in 1984. The official release was on this album, in an a-capella version. The big hit came when the British duo DNA made a dance version in 1990, subsequently released as a single.
The diner the song is named for is a place called Tom’s restaurant in New York, located on the corner of Broadway and West 112 street. The exterior of the place was used in the sitcom Seinfeld as Monk’s café.
When Karlheinz Brandenburg was developing the mp3 standard for compressed music he heard this song on the radio, and wanted to use it as a reference. When he initially tested it, most songs were sounding good in mp3, but Suzanne Vega’s song “sounded horrible”. Vega has been called the Mother of mp3 because of that.