Vega has acknowledged that "Tom's Diner" features a composite of events, and that the rain was from a morning she remembered being in the diner during the spring of 1982, after the initial events of the song. On that day in New York, however, the weather was not rainy, but overcast. In a 2008 essay for The New York Times, Vega confirmed that Holden was the actor whose death she had read about and inspired the line in the song. He had died from a fall at his apartment, suffered after drinking excessively. Only two newspapers in New York City carried comic strips, or "funnies", in 19, and only one, the New York Post, featured a front-page story of the death of Oscar-winning actor William Holden, whose body was discovered on Monday, November 16, 1981.
The lyrics refer to a rainy morning, when she was at the diner on the corner, reading in her newspaper of "a story of an actor / who had died while he was drinking", and afterwards "turning to the horoscope / and looking for the funnies". Vega said that she wrote the song in 1982 Brian Rose has said that it was written sometime between mid-1981 and mid-1982. "Tom's Diner Day": The date of the composition Īn article on Suzanne Vega's official website uses clues in the song to determine the exact date that Vega wrote it. John the Divine, located one block to the east. The "bells of the cathedral" that she remarks hearing in the song are those of the Cathedral of St. She attempted to think and write in this fashion (including a male perspective ) while sitting at Tom's Restaurant. Vega wrote the song based on a comment by her friend Brian Rose, a photographer, who mentioned that in his work, he sometimes felt as if "he saw his whole life through a pane of glass, and like he was the witness to a lot of things, but was never really involved in them". At the end of the song, the narrator leaves the diner to catch the train after the coffee is finished. The ringing of bells at a nearby cathedral causes the narrator to reminisce about an unnamed companion and a midnight picnic. The song mentions reading a newspaper as well as seeing two women, one who enters the diner and one who stands outside in the rain. The song begins with the narrator stopping at a diner for a cup of coffee. The diner later became famous as the location used for the exterior scenes of Monk's Café in the popular 1990s television sitcom Seinfeld. Singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega was reputedly a frequent patron during the early 1980s when she was a student at nearby Barnard College. The "Tom's Diner" of the song is Tom's Restaurant in New York City, a mid-20th-century diner on the corner of Broadway and 112th Street. It was also used as the background soundtrack for the opening scene of the 1993 film Untamed Heart.
The 1991 compilation Tom's Album includes the DNA version as well as cover versions by artists such as After One, Nikki D and Bingo Hand Job ( R.E.M. 1 in Austria, Germany, Greece and Switzerland.
It was later used as the basis for a remix by the British group DNA in 1990, which reached No. When first featured on one of her own studio albums, it appeared as the first track of her 1987 album Solitude Standing. It was first released as a track on the January 1984 issue of Fast Folk Musical Magazine. " Tom's Diner" is a song written in 1982 by American singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega.