- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Suzanne Vega had a surprise #3 hit “Luka” from her second, Platinum album Solitude Standing (one of my favorite albums, period).
The Greatest Music
Ever Recorded!
Suzanne Vega – Solitude Standing (1987): When Suzanne Vega arrived on the musical scene in the mid-1980’s, she was one of the last people that I recall being hailed as “the new Bob Dylan” – or in her case, “the female Bob Dylan” – though the label might apply here. Suzanne Vega proved to be in the vanguard of a host of literate female singer-songwriters whose albums I quickly snapped up, such as Joan Osborne, Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, Shawn Colvin (who provided background vocals on “Luka”), Edie Brickell, Indigo Girls, Fiona Apple, Lisa Loeb, Jewel, and Paula Cole, among many more. There was even a series of three music festivals for these women beginning in 1997 that were spearheaded by Sarah McLachlan, called Lilith Fair; Suzanne Vega regularly appeared there.
Suzanne Vega’s surprise #3 hit “Luka” from her second album Solitude Standing (one of my favorite albums, period) proved that folk-oriented songs had a ready market; and Solitude Standing became a Platinum album. “Luka” is a song about an abused child that Suzanne Vega sings in first person; her pure, unadorned vocals are ideal for that purpose. One of the scenes in the music video for “Luka” was filmed in a small park located one block north of our apartment on Eighth Avenue in Greenwich Village. In a 2018 Dutch documentary, Suzanne Vega spoke about the origin of the song: “I wanted to write about child abuse. . . . I had to think of how to write about a subject that no one talks about.” “Tom’s Diner” opens the album as an a capella slice-of-life song; an instrumental version, “Tom’s Diner (Reprise)” is the final track on the album. Other standout songs include “Ironbound” / “Fancy Poultry”, “In the Eye”, “Night Vision”, the title song “Solitude Standing”, “Calypso”, “Language”, “Gypsy”, and “Wooden Horse (Casper Hauser’s Song)” – yes, that is every song on Solitude Standing; I couldn’t help myself. In 1990, an anonymous duo called DNA released a bootleg single based on “Tom’s Diner” that was set to an electronic beat; originally called “Oh Suzanne” – adapted from the title of the famous Stephen Foster song “Oh! Susanna” (1848) – they had an unexpected hit song a full 3 years after Solitude Standing came out (and nearly 10 years after Vega originally wrote the song). Suzanne Vega allowed the single to be issued legitimately and subsequently released several albums of her own with an edgier sound – such as 99.9F° (1992) and Nine Objects of Desire (1996) – as well as Tom’s Album (1991) that includes several other unsolicited versions of “Tom’s Diner”. On the album sleeve, Suzanne Vega wrote: “A small song about eating breakfast became a song about accidental pregnancy (‘Daddy’s Little Girl’ – Nikki D.) and the recent war in the Gulf (‘Waiting at the Border’). One version incorporates forgotten bits of pop culture (‘Jeannie’s Diner’ [based on the TV sitcom I Dream of Jeannie]). All of them surprised me; a couple made me wince. I include them anyway.” As it turns out, Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the developers of the audio compression format called the MP3, used the a capella version of “Tom’s Diner” to see whether the MP3 would work. The idea is that the compression technique removes layers of sound that most people wouldn’t hear in order to reduce the size of audio files. MP3 files compared to standard compact disc recordings have been compressed at a 12-to-1 ratio, a feat once thought impossible. While popular to this day, the sound quality on MP3’s is not particularly good. As outlined in a 2015 post on the website vice.com by Dan Wilkinson, doctoral music student Ryan Maguire from the University of Virginia’s Center for Computer Music launched the Ghost in the MP3 project. As one of his first endeavors, he captured the layers of sound that are lost to the compression technique in “Tom’s Diner” and posted the result online at https://www.theghostinthemp3.com-/theghostinthemp3.html. The result is a fascinating, eerie piece of music accompanied by scrambled video; much of “Tom’s Diner” is still recognizable, including several complete words and even a phrase or two.