Indeed, the cover of Waits coolly smoking outside a late night bar is pulled directly from the cover of Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, and topped up with garish neon signs and the salacious looks of a prostitute. Heart of Saturday Night (released 1974)įrank Sinatra looms large in this late-night, booze-soaked collection of ballads and jazz scats, the follow up to his debut album Closing Time.
That said, these five albums form the main pillars of my undying devotion to the artist that is Tom Waits. Whichever you choose, it’s still fucking great. Through his songs, I learned such truths as “There ain't no devil, that’s just God when he's drunk,” “There's always free cheddar in the mousetrap,” and “You’re innocent when you dream.”įor those new to Waits, asking where to begin is akin to debating the best position for sex. Tom Waits’ lyrics offered as deep a pool of genius as his melodies-biting, funny, raw, and outright bizarre-as if the poetry of Charles Bukowski was dumped in a blender with broken whiskey bottles and used automobile parts.
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While the Billboard charts saw Wham!’s “Careless Whisper,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” and Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” reach to the top, Waits put out growling back-alley dirges like “Singapore,” “Clap Hands,” and “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” And yet, whatever artifice was layered on top of the tracks, at the root were often the sweetest and purest of melodies seemingly pulled from generations of collective yearning. Perhaps no greater example of this can be seen than in his 1985 album, Rain Dogs.
However, the white hot hatred of the moment burned equally strong with love not long after, as the independence of the Waits’ sound and vision overcame me (drunk or sober).
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