If you were looking to predict the most popular song on Spotify this week, you probably won’t pick an offbeat ’80s hit by a folksy waif that was written 40 years ago. But TikTok has a way of injecting new life into seemingly obscure songs, and that appears to be the case with the current chart-topper.
In 1982, Suzanne Vega released “Tom’s Diner,” a song with an infectious intro and an insistent narrative about a real-life New York City diner located at 112th and Broadway. While originally included on her 1984 album Solitude Standing, it only charted three years later after the success of her breakout single “Luka,” and got a 1990 upgrade from producers DNA.
As Vega explained in a 2008 New York Times essay, “I thought it would be fun to write a song that was like a little film, where the main character sees all these things but can’t respond to any of it unless it relates to him directly. The part about the actor dying was true — it was William Holden.”
The setting is also familiar to TV fans — it’s the cafe that the Seinfeld characters frequent.
The oft-sampled song has its current new life — #1 on the U.S. Spotify Viral 50, and #2 in the Global version of the list — thanks to a TikTok video originally posted in 2019 by German acts AnnenMayKantereit and Giant Rooks.
As the Toronto Star reported, the video was originally uploaded in 2019, and didn’t experience its current surge until several weeks ago. But once it became viral, it became very, very viral, up to 11.4 million views and 2 million likes, as well as a full version uploaded to Spotify that is approaching 66 million plays.
And the original is still getting new life: Recent Grammy winner Doja Cat, collaborating with Tyga, uses a sample from a Vega version throughout “Freaky Deaky,” according to the online sampling encyclopedia WhoSampled.
