Suzanne Vega talks 'Tom's Diner,' 'Luka,' 'Lover Beloved' and playing in Oakmont

Suzanne Vega recalls sitting backstage at “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1990 when her manager told her, “I need to play this thing for you.”

The “thing” was an unauthorized remix of her a cappella song “Tom’s Diner.” Her record label, A&M, wanted to sue the two British electronic music producers behind it, Nick Batt and Neal Slateford, for copyright infringement.

Vega immediately thought the worst.

“My fear was that it was going to be a parody or a joke, because you would not believe how many jokey versions I got of ‘Luka,’ ” she said of her 1987 hit about an abused boy. “I don’t even want to talk about the jokey versions of ‘Luka’ and the parodies. Why would they send them to me? I just threw them all away.”

But when she finally heard the remix of “Tom’s Diner,” it turned out to be a pleasant surprise — to say the least.

“I listened to it and I loved it,” said Vega. “I thought ‘this is very cool. They haven’t changed the song, they’ve just added this thing that makes it a lot more accessible.’ ”

Vega suggested that her record company buy the rights and release it.

That version of “Tom’s Diner” became her biggest hit, reaching No. 1 in Austria, Germany, Greece and Switzerland.

That bit of serendipity is part of the success that’s dotted the alternative folk-rock artist’s recording career that began in earnest with her self-titled debut album in 1985.

And her career continues to this day, bringing her to The Oaks Theater in Oakmont at 8 p.m. on April 25 as part of her first live concert tour since 2020.

Flashing a disarming smile throughout a video chat with the Tribune-Review, Vega paused to assess the arc of her amazing career.

“I think it is an arc. But to most people, it looks sort of like a big mountain and then a sort of downward slope,” she said.

Vega is referring to the fact that she sold over 5 million albums before she turned 30 years old. It’s taken her over three decades to sell the next 5 million. Still, most recording artists would be thrilled to sell a fraction of that total.

For the most part, Vega reached the top of the mountain in 1987. That year she took a risk and released “Luka,” a song about the uncomfortable topic of child abuse, and an unlikely formula for making a hit record.

But that’s not why she wrote and recorded the song.

“Wherever my heart takes me is where I sort of go,” she said.

The tune — with Vega singing as the abused boy Luka, and its haunting refrain, “They only hit until you cry, and after that you don’t ask why” — went to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, her highest-charting song in the United States.

“It was a strange time when that song was top 5 because on one hand, we were having an obvious success,” she said. “We were selling, like, a million albums, and they were selling very quickly, and all the shows were sold out.

”At the same time, it was hard to feel celebratory about it because of what the song is about. It’s about pain, it’s about the pain of child abuse.”

Vega said she heard from a lot of people, including victims who wrote to her and shared their personal stories.

“I saved those letters and I wrote back to people individually. So there was kind of an undercurrent of pain that I was also trying to process in a sense,” she said. “And people seemed to think that I had an answer, that I could give them advice. So, it was a strange time for me personally because I was juggling a lot of things.”

Over time, Vega said she wondered if she would ever have that kind of success again.

“I thought ‘maybe I’m that kind of person,’ that ‘I’m just going to be successful from now on. I’m going to have top 5 hits,’ which, of course, was not the case.”

Even though success eventually slowed for Vega, if she was known only for what she has accomplished as a singer-songwriter and musician, she would still be able to look back on a full, rich artistic life.

But it turns out that her talents run deeper than even her most loyal fans may have realized.

A woman obsessed with acting and women in movies — her first hit song, “Marlene on the Wall,” is about actress Marlene Dietrich – Vega ended up writing and starring in an acclaimed one-woman off-Broadway stage show about the life of the 20^th-century American writer Carson McCullers.

The play, including many new songs Vega wrote for the show, was made into a movie called “Lover Beloved.” It recently made its successful world debut at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas.

McCullers completed her first novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” at the age of 23 in 1940. The story about a deaf man named John Singer, and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in Georgia, became a sensation.

But what drew Vega to the idea of telling McCullers’ story?

It turns out it was the result of an exercise in an acting class she took when she studied at Barnard College in her native New York.

“The exercise was to choose someone in the arts who is no longer alive, come in dressed as them, and be ready to field questions as though you were on a TV show,” Vega explained. “I’d seen a photograph of Carson McCullers and thought from the photo I could probably perform as her. And somehow, that took a root in my heart.”

Vega said she will perform songs from “Lover Beloved” during her Oakmont show, as well as tunes from her career spanning 2020 live album “An Evening of New York Songs and Stories.”

“Most of (the show) is kind of like ‘An evening with,’ (including) a lot of songs people know, ‘Marlene on the Wall,’ ‘Luka,’ ‘Tom’s Diner,’ ” she said. “And then we throw in one or two covers just for fun because … why not?”