Diamond in the Rough

Shawn Colvin and John Leventhal wrote "Diamond in the Rough", the second track on Steady On, 5:02. Suzanne Vega sings background vocals, and T-Bone Wolk and Phil Galdston contributed arrangement ideas. It was not the single; the title track was. It is not the 2012 memoir, which is reported to take its title from this song, though we saw that only in a secondary summary and not in a primary quote.

Setlist.fm gives it 144 plays, second only to "Sunny Came Home" (171), ahead of "Polaroids" (127), "Trouble" (124) and "Shotgun Down the Avalanche" (111). Other recordings listed on MusicBrainz include Live '88 (4:33), a live Austin City Limits performance recorded on April 19, 2001 (5:56), The Best of Sessions at West 54th (4:20), the 2004 Polaroids compilation (4:34) and the 2009 live album (4:04). She performed it on PBS NewsHour on June 25, 2012, in a profile by Jeffrey Brown.

We found no statement from Colvin on what the song means and no covers or samples, and we could not tell whether our upload is the studio track or a live version.