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'The signs there really caught my eye because they almost looked like poetry. "Boxed beef"… this sort of thing. So some of the language came from the signs.' The Ironbound aspect of the song derives from the fact that, 'I wrote that at a point when I was avoiding marriage. So this character of the woman who feels bound by her circumstances was something I was feeling at the time'.

A Brief Romance
Vega's song 'Night Vision' drew inspiration from a poem by Paul Eluard about a 1921 painting by the Spanish artist Juan Gris depicting a guitar and a glass sitting on a table by an open window. 'I thought it was so great and beautiful, so I just took the images and put them right in the middle of the song.'

Yet, as is usual with the singer's borrowings, the inspiration resonated because it connected with her real life. 'I had my own guitar and my own table and I was living in a room by myself so these few objects that I had really mattered to me. I didn't have much at that point. It was in the painting but it was also there in my own life.'

Another track that is sometimes overlooked, perhaps because it seems to be just another lost love lament, is 'Gypsy'. Typically of Vega, though, it comes with a revealing tale attached. In the late '70s, she had attended a Summer Camp as its 'dance and folk-singing counsellor'. There she met an English lad, slightly older than her, who was the arts and crafts counsellor. Their brief romance 'broadened my horizons in ways that were not acceptable to the staff. I got into trouble because I would come in, sign for the curfew, then go back out again and meet this boy'. The boy only heard the song several decades later, which prompted him to get back in touch. Happily, they two have remained good friends ever since.

Before the album closes, with a charmingly quirky instrumental reprise of 'Tom's Diner', Vega delivers 'Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song)'. As well as being a compelling evocation of the life of an enigmatic German boy said to have 'grown up in the total isolation of a darkened cell', the song incorporates a pun which makes it refer (as does the track 'Night Vision') to the singer's own life.

In the lyrics, she uses the phrase, 'I want to be a rider like my father' (meaning a rider of horses). But, points out Vega, 'My own father was a writer, he wrote novels and short stories, so that particular line is a kind of a joke for me, a little pun'.

Ticket To Travel
A&M released the album on April the 1st, 1987 and it entered the Billboard chart one week later, eventually rising to No 11. Globally, however, it fared even better, peaking at No 2 in the UK, No 1 in New Zealand and Sweden, and 'Top Tenning' in Germany, Austria, Norway, Switzerland and Australia.

The album's most successful single, 'Luka', racked up impressive chart-placings all over the world, while 'Tom's Diner' went on to secure an extraordinary life for itself in terms of cover versions. A 1990 version by DNA featuring Suzanne Vega reached No 1 in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, No 2 in the UK and Ireland, No 5 in the US and No 8 in New Zealand.

As well as this, the song has been covered by Giorgio Moroder and Britney Spears, Nikki D and Bingo Hand Job (REM plus Billy Bragg), been sampled by artists including Public Enemy, Twin Hype, Fall Out Boy and L'il Kim, and was also used as the soundtrack for the opening scene of the 1993 film Untamed Heart, with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater.

As if this legacy isn't impressive enough, the song was used by German mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg to perfect the audio compression format MP3. 'When I was 'ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm… somewhere down the corridor, a radio was playing the song "Tom's Diner". I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice.' But he did, and as a result, Vega has been accorded the title 'Mother Of MP3'.

Speaking of the song during a BBC Radio 4 MasterTapes programme in 2012, Vega said, 'In a way that song has become my passport. I can go to any customs desk anywhere in the world and if they ask me what kind of songs I sing, I just sing the melody of "Tom's Diner", and they go, "Oh, yeah!"… Then they wave me through. It's been my ticket to travel everywhere'.

The only downside of this level of success is that 'Tom's Diner' has possibly caused its exquisite parent album, Solitude Standing, to become somewhat eclipsed. Don't let that sorry state of affairs continue.