I was listening to Lust For Lists with Lori Majewski on SiriusXM. It's usually just new wave and alternative music, but a guest DJ may throw in something else. The last song I heard was
Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega, but it was a re-mix. I didn't know there were 2 other re-mixes I hadn't heard before, so here are all 4 versions. Tom's Diner is a song by American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega. Written in 1981 or 1982, it was first included as a track on the January 1984 issue of Fast Folk Musical Magazine. Originally featured on her second studio album, Solitude Standing (1987), it was released as a single in Europe only in 1987 following the success of her single "Luka". It was later used as the basis for a remix by the English electronic music producers DNA in 1990, which reached No. 1 in Austria, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The song is also known for its use in testing various digital compression schemes during the development of the MP3, earning Vega the title of "Mother of the MP3".
The song spawned a number of hip-hop, dance, and rock remixes and remakes from artists such as Peter Behrens (drummer from Trio) and Bingo Hand Job, a whimsical one-time collaboration between Billy Bragg and R.E.M. It was also sampled in songs by Public Enemy, Nikki D, Tupac Shakur, Twin Hype, Yo Gotti and Lil' Kim, among other hip-hop acts. In 1991, Vega, noting the huge number of remakes of the song, released Tom's Album, a compilation of different versions of the song, spanning a variety of musical genres, including a parody by Richard Cheese that worked in references to fantasy sitcom television series I Dream of Jeannie called "Jeannie's Diner", which Nick at Nite would use to promote its airings of the show. The album also featured another DNA remix of one of Vega's songs, "Rusted Pipe", originally on her third studio album Days of Open Hand (1990). On the album's sleeve, 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). All of them surprised me; a couple made me wince. I include them anyway." The album also includes the parody by Bingo Hand Job, recorded at a live performance in 1991. This version was not included on the live album of this concert because the band members felt it "didn't meet the lowly standards of Bingo Hand Job."
In 2014, American rock band Fall Out Boy used an interpolation of "Tom's Diner" in their song "Centuries". In 2024, American rapper Cupcakke interpolated the song in her track "Dora" on her fifth studio album Dauntless Manifesto. In the same year, Puerto Rican singer Myke Towers and American producer Benny Blanco used the song as a melodic base in their song "Degenere". In 2025, K-pop girl group Ive interpolated the song in their title track "Attitude". In 2015, sound artist and composer Ryan Maguire released the track "moDernisT" (an anagram of "Tom's Diner") as a part of his project "The Ghost in the MP3". "moDernisT" is composed exclusively of the sounds deleted during MP3 compression from the song "Tom's Diner", known as the mother of the MP3. A detailed account of the techniques used to isolate the sounds deleted during MP3 compression, along with the conceptual motivation for the project, was published in the 2014 Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference. In 2020, English producer Robbie Doherty remixed the song with artist Keees, titling it "Pour the Milk", launching it to No. 44 on the UK singles chart. As of 2023, there are over 50 versions of "Tom's Diner".
The "Tom's Diner" of the song is Tom's Restaurant in Manhattan, New York City, a mid-20th-century diner on the northeast corner of Broadway and West 112th Street. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega was reputedly a frequent patron during the early 1980s when she was a student at nearby Barnard College. The diner later became famous as the location used for the exterior scenes of Monk's Café in the popular 1990s television sitcom Seinfeld. It's located at 2880 Broadway (on the corner of West 112th Street) in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is on the ground floor of Columbia University's Armstrong Hall, home to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Frequented by Columbia students and faculty, it was founded by Tom Glikas in the 1940s and after a sale at some undetermined point has been owned and operated by the Greek-American family of Minas Zoulis, who retained the original name. Senator John McCain often ate at Tom's when he visited his daughter Meghan when she was a student at Columbia. Likewise, Barack Obama frequented the restaurant as a student at Columbia.
DNA was the name taken by English electronic music producers Nick Batt and Neal Slateford, best known for releasing a remix of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" in 1990. As well as "Tom's Diner", the duo remixed two other Suzanne Vega tracks: "Rusted Pipe" in 1991, and a radio mix of "Rosemary" in 2000. After a brief lull, the duo reappeared with a mix of the Loreena McKennitt track "The Mummers' Dance", which reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart in 1997. Batt worked extensively with Goldfrapp on their albums Felt Mountain, Black Cherry and Supernature, receiving an Ivor Novello Award for co-writing the Black Cherry track "Strict Machine". In 1990, two English record producers under the name DNA remixed "Tom's Diner", grafting Vega's vocals onto a dance beat from British musical collective Soul II Soul ("Keep On Movin'") and turning her simple ad-libbed outro – "Do do do uh, do da-do uh" – into the song's driving hook. At the time, it was impossible to get a whole song into a sampler, so they spent evenings and weekends cutting Vega's vocals into little bits. Without permission from Vega, her record label, or publisher, the duo released the remix on a limited basis for distribution to clubs as "Oh Suzanne" by "DNA featuring Suzanne Vega". Vega's record company of the time, A&M, arranged to release the remix rather than take DNA to court for copyright infringement.
For the release of his fourteenth studio album Déjà Vu on June 12, 2015, Italian composer and record producer Giorgio Moroder included a cover version of the song, featuring American pop singer Britney Spears on his album as the eighth track. It was later released as the album's fourth and final single on October 9, 2015, with two new remixes included, marking the second release from Spears in 2015, following "Pretty Girls" with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, and additionally her first featured appearance since "S&M (Remix)" in 2011. Despite being a non-single track at that time, it became Moroder's best-selling digital song to date, debuting and peaking at number 38 on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Songs chart, and number fourteen on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Digital Songs chart, during the week of July 4, 2015.
The German rock bands AnnenMayKantereit and Giant Rooks covered the song in 2019. The cover went viral on TikTok in March 2022, reaching more than 120 million views on TikTok and 330 million streams on Spotify as of November 2024. AnnenMayKantereit (occasionally shortened AMK) is a German rock band founded in Cologne in 2011. Their songs are predominantly performed in German, but the band also publishes cover songs in English occasionally. A notable feature of the band's music is the distinct and rough voice of singer Henning May. Giant Rooks are a German indie rock band from Hamm, Germany founded in 2014. In 2019, they won the 1Live Krone Award and the Preis für Popkultur in the months following the release of their EP Wild Stare. Their debut album Rookery was released in August 2020.
TLDR. Here are the 4 main versions of 50+ different versions of the song, the original from 1987, the British trip-hop remake from 1990, the Italian "Father of Disco" remake from 2015, and the version by not one, but two German rock bands in 2019. When a song gets re-made over and over, it should get better every time, right? You be the judge of how well that worked out. And here's Suzanne Vega's #3 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, (#15 on the Mainstream Rock chart), Luka. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9x-DENKIts&list=PLfGibfZATlGq6t4uHz2Haaf3EV_3ymQAo&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4jtIDaeaWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_x7gTQOEs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r3B7yz6J68 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiTPX2ks-jU&list=PLfGibfZATlGq6t4uHz2Haaf3EV_3ymQAo&index=2 
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