In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.
Suzanne Vega is a writer. Her lyrics are clear and sharp and focused, and they have the power to make you feel the things that she describes. She’s got a wonderfully soothing, compulsively listenable voice, but it’s not the kind of voice that draws attention to itself. Instead, she sings in ways that pull your brain toward her words. She’s the kind of songwriter who writes more than songs. She was publishing poetry when she was still a kid. An anthology of her writing came out in 1999. In 2016, she and Duncan Shiek wrote a play about the novelist Caron McCullers. If Vega’s music career had never taken off, she would’ve almost certainly found her way into some other creative field, or maybe into many other creative fields. Her writing probably would’ve been central to any of them, too.
Given all that, it’s kind of funny that Suzanne Vega’s greatest pop-cultural legacy is a wordless string of syllables, doot-dooted out casually but hypnotically on an acapella album track. Some British dance DJs remixed those doot-doots and turned them into a giant international hit, and the doot-doots keep popping up — re-remixed or sampled or quoted or used to soundtrack some stray piece of ephemera. Vega’s song “Tom’s Diner” is specifically about existing in the world and feeling like you’re not a true participant, like you’re just watching everyone else. Most writers know this feeling. It’s kind of central to the act of writing. So maybe it’s appropriate that Suzanne Vega herself has almost been a passive participant in the life of “Tom’s Diner,” a song that she wrote and sang. Her doot-doots have taken on all these lives that she could’ve never envisioned, and that is beautiful.
This column is not about “Tom’s Diner,” but this is probably the only pop-chart column that I will ever write about Suzanne Vega, so I can’t not talk about “Tom’s Diner.” The unexpected success of “Tom’s Diner” is an important part of the story of Suzanne Vega’s only #1 hit on the Billboard Modern Rock charts. Vega scored that hit near the beginning of the vaunted grunge era, when sharply written and carefully orchestrated singer-songwriter music was quickly losing its cultural primacy. The Modern Rock charts were fairly slow to catch up to this new reality, and Vega’s song “Blood Makes Noise” made a certain sense when it showed up alongside Pearl Jam or whoever. It also made a certain sense after “Tom’s Diner.”
First, the backstory. Suzanne Vega was born Suzanne Nadine Peck in Santa Monica, but she didn’t live there for long. Her parents broke up when she was young, and her mother married Edgardo Vega Yunqué, the Puerto Rican novelist who wrote under the name Ed Vega. For the first few years of her life, Suzanne didn’t realize that Ed wasn’t her biological father. In any case, that’s why this white lady has a name that isn’t generally associated with white people. The family moved to New York, and that’s where Suzanne grew up.
As a young person, Suzanne Vega lived the life of a literary New York cool kid. She studied modern dance at the New York school now known as LaGuardia — the vaunted Fame school where so many future artists went. Then Vega majored in English at Barnard, and she became a regular at the weekly Songwriters Exchange night at the West Village’s Cornelia Street Café and at another West Village venue called Folk City. In 1982, Vega became one of the founders of Fast Folk, a magazine and anthology series dedicated to documenting the young singer-songwriters of that scene. People like Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, and Lyle Lovett got their start at least partly through Fast Folk. So did Suzanne Vega.
The Fast Folk thing was a genuine New York underground scene, though it didn’t have the same inherent-danger appeal as some of the other things that were happening in the city around the same time. In 1984, Vega was in her mid-twenties, and she signed to A&M, becoming the first of the Fast Folk artists to make the jump to a major label. At the time, she was in her mid-twenties. Patti Smith’s longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye co-produced Vega’s self-titled 1985 debut. Critics hailed the record. It snuck onto that year’s Pazz & Jop poll at #39 — right behind fellow folksinger Marti Jones’ Unsophisticated Time, right ahead of the Minutemen’s 3-Way Tie (For Last). Suzanne Vega didn’t exactly do huge numbers in the US, but it was a genuine hit in the UK, reaching #11 and going platinum. A year after the album came out, Vega recorded “Left Of Center” for the Pretty In Pink soundtrack, with Joe Jackson on piano. That song smacks. I hear that song, and I’m like: I hear you, buddy. That’s me, too — left of center, off of the strip.
As her star rose, Suzanne Vega maintained relationships with different parts of the music intelligentsia. She co-wrote a couple of songs with Philip Glass for one of his albums, and Lou Reed, someone who’s been in this column a couple of times, interviewed her on 120 Minutes. Vega’s sophomore album Solitude Standing came out in 1987, and one of its songs became an out-of-nowhere pop hit. “Luka” is written from the perspective of a little kid who’s being abused at home and who’s trying to hide the effects of that abuse from a neighbor. Vega didn’t admit until years later that “Luka” wasn’t entirely fictional, that it was really inspired by things that she went through with her stepfather. It’s a genuinely pretty and aesthetically arresting song, and Vega’s casual, almost blithe delivery contrasts sharply with the heavy-ass subject matter.
Songs like “Luka” aren’t necessarily supposed to become hits, but that one was early in a wave of issues-driven conversation-piece songs that did very well on the pop charts in the late ’80s. Vega had never been on the Hot 100 before “Luka,” and that song went all the way to #3; it’s still her highest-charting single. “Luka” got play on college radio, too. On that year’s Pazz & Jop poll, critics voted “Luka” the year’s #2 song. (It came in behind Prince’s “Sign O’ The Times,” another message-driven pop song. Prince, incidentally, loved “Luka.”) Solitude Standing didn’t make it onto the Pazz & Jop poll, but it went platinum. In 1989, Vega became the first woman to headline Glastonbury. She performed up on that stage in a bulletproof vest, like 50 Cent, because she’d been getting death threats from an obsessed fan. In 2020, Michael Tedder did a great Vega interview for Stereogum’s We’ve Got A File On You series, and she talks about the experience in there.
On her third album, 1990’s Days Of Open Hand, Suzanne Vega’s songwriting grew a little more impressionistic, and she and her songwriters messed around more with synth sounds — quietly radical choices for someone who was still a pretty traditional folk musician. Vega landed on the Modern Rock chart for the first time with the chugging, jangling lead single “Book Of Dreams.” (It’s an 8.) The album is lovely, but it was overshadowed by another Suzanne Vega record that had nothing to do with traditional folk music.
Vega began her Solitude Standing album with an acappella track called “Tom’s Diner,” a story-song in which Vega paints an image of herself silently observing the lives of the people swirling around her at the titular eating establishment. Sometime in the early ’90s, my parents got their first CD player, and I checked the Solitude Standing CD out of the library. “Tom’s Diner” weirded me out and intrigued me deeply. It sounded unfinished. Even without backing music, Vega sang the entire song on-beat, as if she was leaving space for the beat that should’ve been pulsing underneath her voice. I couldn’t understand why that “Tom’s Diner” wasn’t the “Tom’s Diner” that I knew. As it turned out, that “Tom’s Diner” wasn’t on the album because it didn’t exist yet. Instead, Vega’s version served as the raw material for something bigger.
“Tom’s Diner” dated all the way back to Suzanne Vega’s Fast Folk days. She was surprised when A&M decided to release “Tom’s Diner” as a single in the UK, but it did about as well as you could expect an observational acappella folk song to do, peaking at #58 over there. Maybe that’s why the young dance duo DNA had the idea to make a bootleg single, putting those “Tom’s Diner” vocals over the beat from Soul II Soul’s club hit “Keep On Movin’.” DNA initially released their “Tom’s Diner” remix as an unauthorized bootleg — a pretty common thing in the sample-happy rave underground at the time. At first, they called it “Oh Suzanne,” and it became a club hit.
When A&M found out about “Oh Suzanne,” they could’ve hit DNA with a cease-and-desist. But when Suzanne Vega heard the remix, she liked it. She was right to like it. The DNA version of “Tom’s Diner” is a total fucking banger. It keeps all of Vega’s writing intact, and it never vacillates from the strange stillness of the original. But it makes the song funky, and it makes a hypnotic hook out of Vega’s improvised doot-doot outro. With Vega’s blessing, A&M licensed “Oh Suzanne” for a proper release, and it became a surprise global smash, topping charts in a bunch of countries. In the US, “Tom’s Diner” peaked at #5 on the Hot 100, #10 on the R&B chart, and #7 on the Modern Rock one. (It’s a 10.)
“Tom’s Diner” didn’t go as high as “Luka” on the pop charts, but it’s Suzanne Vega’s most-streamed song by far today. It’s been sampled over and over, and I bet Vega is set for life from its royalties. The song also has a strange place in music history: It’s the first track that was ever mastered for MP3. In the aforementioned Stereogum interview, Vega said, “I am both proud of my tiny role in music history and also a bit mortified that it turned out to be sort of the downfall of music as we knew it.” There’s really no other track like “Tom’s Diner,” and plenty of people probably assumed, or maybe hoped, that Vega would capitalize on that leftfield success by making a dance album. She didn’t do that, exactly, but she also didn’t not do that.
For her next album, Suzanne Vega went to work with the producer Mitchell Froom. Froom started off as a keyboard player for the also-ran San Francisco hard rock band Gamma in the early ’80s, and his production career basically started when he scored the arty 1982 sci-fi porn movie Café Flesh. From there, Froom produced some successful ’80s records for critical favorites the Del Fuegos, Los Lobos, and Crowded House. That led to production jobs for legends like Richard Thompson, Bob Dylan, and Paul McCartney. It took him six years to go from making an X-rated movie score to producing Paul McCartney — pretty good! Froom has already been in this column once for his work on Elvis Costello’s “The Other Side Of Summer.”
In 1992, Froom produced Vega’s album 99.9F°. In that Stereogum interview, Vega remembered, “I thought I was gonna get a solid pop producer and we would do work like what he did with Crowded House. I was a Crowded House fan, I loved it. And I thought, ‘Yeah, it’s gonna sound like that.’ But Mitchell actually changes from artist to artist, and a lot of the time, he’ll take his cues from the artist he’s working with.” (Crowded House’s highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1991’s “Chocolate Cake,” peaked at #2. It’s a 6.)
Together, Suzanne Vega and Mitchell Froom did not make solid pop. They made something else. “Blood Makes Noise” was the first song that Vega and Froom made together. Vega had already written a track about being stressed out and overwhelmed. Vega’s narrator is trying to talk to a doctor, to answer some questions, but the rush of her own thoughts keeps her from forming coherent responses. There’s a frantic ping-ponging in her head, and she explains it as noise: “I’m standing in a windy tunnel, shouting through the roar/ And I’d like to give the information you’re asking for.” She sings those lines in a clipped, fast-paced, matter-of-fact monotone, like a telephone operator. The calm in her voice stands in stark counterpoint to the chaos in her brain. It evokes a state of mind that most of us probably know very well: Putting on a professional, businesslike affect to mask the fact that you’re melting down internally.
In her Stereogum interview, Vega says, “I just sort of chanted the words into the air and [Froom] recorded it. And when I came in the next day, he had that anvil sound and the crashing loop and the bassline.” In effect, Froom responded to those “Blood Makes Noise” lyrics by making noise. The song’s bassline is a wormy, squirmy thing. It’s at least vaguely funky, but it’s also kind of assaultive. It eats at your brain through repetition. Froom surrounds that bassline with clangs and bings and whirrs. There’s also a heavily distorted, fuzzed-out guitar loop from David Hidalgo, Los Lobos leader and Froom’s bandmate in the side project Latin Playboys. (Los Lobos’ highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1990’s “Down On The Riverbed,” peaked at #16.) Vega and Froom apparently didn’t know anything about industrial music when they made “Blood Makes Noise,” so I guess they just independently arrived at a similar idea of building tunes out of clattering rhythmic noise. If I had to guess, I would posit that they were at least aware of Public Enemy, who had their own ideas about funky abrasiveness.
I don’t remember hearing “Blood Makes Noise” on the radio when it came out, but I would’ve been into it. Some listeners apparently interpreted it as a song about waiting for the results of an HIV test, which makes sense, given the timing. By that same token, way too many music reviews for at least the next year are going to start with unfortunate preambles about the second Trump era. (I was guilty of doing that a bunch of times eight years ago. I’m trying not to do it this time.) Vega has said that wasn’t the idea, and I definitely hear “Blood Makes Noise” more as a song about general stress. Honestly, though, there’s something almost joyous in the divide between the deadpan delivery and the honking, grinding silliness of the music.
“Blood Makes Noise” almost makes stress sound like fun. The bangs and scratches and screeches melt together into something almost restrained, and Suzanne Vega’s voice goes happily skipping over all of it. It’s a mutant pop song that still mostly works as a pop song. It must’ve been terribly audacious for a folksinger to jump headlong into this wild and thorny production, and I think the audacity was probably the key. “Blood Makes Noise” moves Vega even further from her Fast Folk homebase than the “Tom’s Diner” remake did, but she sounds totally comfortable. She made “Left Of Center,” and then she made something that was really left of center. I think that’s awesome.
“Blood Makes Noise” sounds a lot like plenty of the music that I liked a few years later. Vega’s intonation has at least a passing relationship to rap, and plenty of other white weirdos would make their own skronking, shambling avant-rap in the years ahead: Beck, Lucas, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. I bet all those folks were into “Blood Makes Noise.” This seems like a good place to point out that Vega and Froom are not just musical collaborators. They got married in 1994 and divorced three years later. Their daughter Ruby Froom was born in 1994, and Soul Coughing’s 1994 debut album Ruby Vroom is named after her. Ruby Vroom sounds a lot like “Blood Makes Noise.” (Soul Coughing’s highest-charting Modern Rock single, 1998’s “Circles,” peaked at #8. That one kind of sounds like “Blood Makes Noise,” too. It’s an 8.)
So “Blood Makes Noise” was probably influential, but it didn’t really cross over. The song never came close to the Hot 100, and Vega wouldn’t really have a place on alt-rock radio for much longer. After “Blood Makes Noise,” she reached #13 with the title track from 99.9F°. I do remember hearing that song on the radio, and I always really liked it. The LP went gold, though it took five years. Vega hasn’t been back on the Modern Rock chart since then, and she hasn’t really made any more hits, either.
Does that matter? I don’t think it matters. Suzanne Vega’s two isolated moments of commercial success both feel like brilliant little accidents in retrospect. 99.9F° is an admirable left-turn that does very cool things with the leeway that Vega’s two previous hits probably bought her. She and Froom made one more album, 1996’s Nine Objects Of Desire, together. She’s worked steadily since then, and most of her projects seem like passion projects. Her most recent studio album Lover, Beloved came out in 2016, and it was tied in with her play about Carson McCullers. When Vega talked to Stereogum in 2020, it was to promote An Evening Of New York Songs And Stories, a live record where she went through stripped-down versions of her older songs. She’s got another new record on the way, and her freaked-out, energized single “Rats” came out last month. She seems cool as hell.
In a way, Suzanne Vega was probably a precursor the Lilith Fair artists of the ’90s. Some of those artists — I’m thinking of Fiona Apple in particular — really built on the more experimental fare that Vega made. I think Vega also had something to do with avant-pop sounds becoming mainstream-adjacent in the ’90s. Really, though, “Blood Makes Noise” arrived at one of the last moments that an artist like her, with a song like that, could make an impact on modern rock radio. In the years ahead, this column will move steadily toward louder, fuzzier rock songs, usually made by men. I love a lot of that music, but alt-rock radio really lost something when it largely stopped playing Suzanne Vega and artists like her.
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: In the midst of the 2020 COVID lockdowns, the British crossover thrash veterans Acid Reign dropped a very fun rage-out cover of “Blood Makes Noise,” and Vega herself popped up in the remotely taped video. Here it is:
