Sunday's Cool: The Tom Waits Starter Pack

A few beautiful melodies telling you terrible things, and vice-versa.

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things,” goes a famous Tom Waits quote, and that’s true enough, but he also likes terrible melodies telling him beautiful things, or terrifying melodies telling him, well, terrifying things. Over the course of his nearly 50-year career, the man has crafted a reputation as the poet laureate of the junkyard crackpots, a carnival barker for God’s freakshow. For 1999’s Mystery Men, Kinka Usher cast Waits as an brilliant inventor of non-lethal weapons who lived in a funhouse where he also specialized in aromatherapy, laser hair removal, carnival rides and chicken rentals. It kinda worked. 

But there are two reasons I want to write about Waits this week. The first is that recent events have been pretty grim, and a good deal of what I’m tempted to write about today would come off as either a self-righteous screed or self-pity. I like turning to Tom Waits in these times, because beautiful melodies telling you terrible things and vice-versa can provide some perspective. 

The second is that something I hear a lot from people is that they’ve never been able to get into Waits. That is — I cannot emphasize this enough — completely understandable. His voice has been through a lot of permutations over the years, but it usually sounds like someone soaked it in bourbon and then grilled it on the hood of a hot Chevy during the heat death of the universe. It sounds like Cookie Monster. It is, to put it lightly, an acquired taste. 

But acquired tastes are often the ones you end up savoring the most, in my experience, and that’s certainly been true for me, here, in this case. Tom has written some of the most wonderful things I have ever heard, full stop. And while he is certainly capable of writing some of his generation’s saddest songs, I also think he has written some of its most graceful, beautiful and, ultimately, hopeful. A Southern Californian native who dismissed his peers’ infatuation with the counterculture movement in favor of Beat poets, this Bob Dylan enthusiast spent his youth doing a series of odd jobs and writing songs about the characters he met along the way. Working the door at a coffeeshop led to a few successful gigs there, which got him a recording contract and kicked off his early career as a jazzman.

Hints of Waits’ promise abound in this era. Early coffeeshop hymns like “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” and “Ol’ 55” are pretty and understandably famous, if not nearly as idiosyncratic as Waits’ later offerings would become. But there’s a lot of adventurous fun to be had in the scat flow of “The One That Got Away” and it is wild to hear him mine real melancholy from “Waltzing Matilda” on “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”

In the late 70s, an Irish scriptwriter named Kathleen Brennan became Waits’ co-writer, producer, muse and, not least of all, wife. she encouraged him to follow his vaudeville instincts, seeking inspiration from experimental weirdos like Captain Beefheart. This led to critically acclaimed forays into spooky, percussion-forward graveyard romps that sound like a bridge troll’s one man band (“God’s Away on Business”) or a hobo’s campfire ghost story (“What’s He Building in There?”). 

As Waits has aged, he’s leaned into folk and blues, dedicating a huge number of love songs to Brennan who — contrary to Waits’ many songs about two-timing ne'er-do-wells — he’s stayed married to since 1980. This is where you get the quieter, somber numbers like “Picture in a Frame” and “Flower’s Grave,” which are less experimental but showcase Waits’ continued devotion to pushing his lyrical craft forward.

Waits’ lifelong association with criminals, outcasts and freaks has cultivated a deep compassion for the marginalized. He has a lot in common with Rich Mullins, in that regard. You can hear it in his work on “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet,” which Waits did not write (the song is “attributed” to an unknown homeless man) but it still encapsulates a huge part of his focus. It’s easy to preach that the Kingdom of God belongs to these people, but Tom Waits really believes it. And if we listened to him a little more, maybe we’d believe it too.

So here are just a few Tom Waits songs for the Tom Waits-curious. I don’t promise that listening to these will immediately endear you to his rougher edges. But they may offer a corrective on a singer it’s easy to get wrong, someone who enjoys the clash of lyrical substance and melodic vibe. They may also help teach us to interpret this era, where terrible times can tell us beautiful things. 

1. The House Where Nobody Lives 

One of Waits’ great skills as a songwriter is spinning profundity out of the most blasé material. In this case, musings about an abandoned old home in his neighborhood ends up becoming a meditation on one of his great obsessions: worth. After spending a series of verses stressing just what a run-down, ugly piece of junk this house is, Waits turns the song around in the final few lines by asking audiences to reconsider what a nice home might actually look like. 

This is such a good look at how nimbly Waits mixes melancholy and beauty and joy together in the same cocktail. His tour of this old house evokes revulsion (“the weeds had grown up just as high as the door”), pity (“Once it held laughter. Once it held dreams”), mystery (“Did someone do somebody wrong?”) and, in the final verse, a sweet sense of contentment and a treatise to savor the things you love. It leaves me both a little sadder and a little happier. That’s the Waits magic, baby!

2. Down There By the Train 

As good an ode to the scandal of the gospel as American music has produced since “Amazing Grace,” here Waits depicts salvation as a train and promises that there is a place where it goes slow enough for everyone to get on board. The first verse evokes old spirituals, using familiar imagery of a place “where the sinner can be washed in the Blood of the Lamb.” But in subsequent verses, Waits expounds upon the full scope of the promise. “There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth,” he sings. “I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth.” Which is a pretty wild thing to sing! Downright offensive, which is, of course, the point. 

You might be familiar with Johnny Cash’s country-tinged version of the song, which is technically a cover, depending on how you think about such things. Waits wrote the song, Cash got wind of it and liked it enough to record it for 1994’s American Recordings. Waits didn’t release his own, original version until 2006’s Orphans, a massive collection of b-sides with several tracks that rank among Waits’ best (also check out “Long Way Home” and “You Can Never Hold Back Spring.”) I prefer the desperate urgency of Waits’ version, but Cash is one of the few other singers who can give the song a believable amount of grit. (Thrice’s Dustin Kensrue is a big Tom Waits guy, and he released his own bare bones spin in 2016).  

3. Fish and Bird 

Waits has written a handful of the saddest songs of all time, so it’s really saying something that his saddest might be this fairy tale riff on Romeo and Juliet about a whale and a bird who fall in love. “He said ‘You cannot live in the ocean’ and she said to him ‘you never can live in the sky.’” Good lord. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to walk down the Coulée verte in Paris with this in the AirPods, bawling my eyes out. Me! A grown man! What would I have told somebody if they’d asked me if everything was okay? “Is everything okay? Love between whales and birds is fundamentally impossible and you have the audacity to ask me if everything is okay?” (Fortunately, a French person would never ask anyone if everything is okay.) Maybe the most terrible thing one of Tom Waits’ beautiful melodies has ever told anyone is a whale telling a bird “I’ll always pretend that you’re mine.” 

If you want an example of just how important Waits’ voice is to what he does, check out Aoife O'Donovan and Chris Thile’s folksy cover of this song. No hate for either O’Donovan or Thile, who are both fine musicians and have very conventionally pretty voices and all, but the song really doesn’t land unless it sounds a little ugly. 

4. Take It With Me

It’d be a crime not to include one of Waits’ love songs here since, for someone who has been interested in documenting the lives of the lonely and down-and-out, he also loves romance. I’m partial to “Take It With Me,” which the couple co-wrote for each other. The idea was to spin Kaufman’s old “You can’t take it with you” phrase on its head, by meditating on the things that you can. Waits’ final verse zoom-in on his wife’s beating heart is a show-stopper, but the best line is one Kathleen wrote: “All that you love is all you own.” 

5. The Day After Tomorrow

Probably my favorite Waits song, and one Liz leaned over to turn off when it came on while I was driving because she knows it can take me to some weird places. A 2004 song from the peak of the Bush Administration written from the perspective of a young soldier’s letter to his wife back home in Illinois. Instead of “I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not honour more”-type pontificating, this soldier is profoundly over the service and the idea of armies, generally. In a song full of musings about how God picks which side to support in armed conflict and the broad pointlessness of war, maybe the most beautiful line is when he tells her “What I miss, you don’t believe: shoveling snow and raking leaves.”

I’m sure a lot of Waits purists will be mad that I didn’t include this or that tune. The guy’s got a lot of songs, and I know a few eras are underrepresented here. I’ve got a full mix on Spotify that might cover a few more bases. Feel free to share any I missed in the comments.

---

• Watching: Max’s The Other Two continues to be a very funny look at the lackluster lives of the two older siblings of a Bieber-esque pop superstar. In the third season, they’re actively turning Brooke and Carey into real villains instead of pathetic losers, which is an interesting choice. We’ll see how it pays off. Josh Segarra and Ken Marino remain incredible.

• Reading: Alex Segura’s Secret Identity, a mystery set in the 1970s comic book industry. A book like this will always invite comparisons to the incomparable The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, but Segura wisely zigs when you think he’s going to zag for more genre-specific waters. Really fun read.

• Listening: Made a summer mix for all you summerheads. Lots of skuzzy girl rock, some indie dreampop, a few bops and just a dash of punk rock. Across the Summerverse.