Great Music While High: Tom Waits Ballads

I know what you’re thinking, Tom Waits seems more fitting for a site called Whiskyist.com and though I do enjoy a fine whisky, I am first and foremost a cannabis aficionado. Tom Waits goes down easy with a bong hit, too.

With a voice that sounds akin to shattered crystal falling through a didgeridoo (one critic described his voice: “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car”) and lyrics that evoke and explore sadness, grief and misery without descending into sentimentality, Tom Waits creates vertiable anthems of despair. Forget a gentle pluck, Waits takes a blow torch to your heart strings and leaves you feeling every bit as sorrowful as the anti-heroes of his songs.

Somehow, though, a catharsis occurs, an emotional leeching, a drain of ill humours from the blood. Perhaps it’s the sheer contrast between Tom Waits’ characters and our own pleasant (by comparison) circumstances that engender such an emotional purge. Thematically, Waits draws on familiar archetypes and obscure folklore. He mines deep into seedy underworlds, both real and imagined, and pulls forth diamonds.

I’ll only mention three of my favorite Tom Waits ballads, though there are plenty more.

“Waltzing Matilda” (AKA Tom Traubert’s Blues):

Some lyrics:

And it’s a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal

No prima donna, the perfume is on
An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey
And goodnight to the street sweepers
The night watchman flame keepers and goodnight to Matilda too

 

“Shiver Me Timbers”:

Some lyrics:

And the fog’s liftin’
And the sand’s shiftin’
I’m driftin’ on out
Ol’ Captain Ahab
He ain’t got nothin’ on me, now.
So swallow me, don’t follow me
I’m trav’lin’ alone
Blue water’s my daughter
‘n I’m gonna skip like a stone

So please call my missus
Gotta tell her not to cry
‘Cause my goodbye is written
By the moon in the sky
Hey and nobody knows me
I can’t fathom my stayin’
Shiver me timbers
‘Cause I’m a-sailin’ away

 

And Finally, “Hold On”:

Some lyrics:

Down by the Riverside motel,
It’s 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store she closed her eyes
And started swaying
But it’s so hard to dance that way
When it’s cold and there’s no music
Well your old hometown is so far away
But, inside your head there’s a record
That’s playing, a song called

Hold on, hold on
You really got to hold on
Take my hand, I’m standing right here
And just hold on.

A friend of mine once heard me listening to Tom Waits and said, “I see you’re still listening to that sad bastard music?” Yes, I am still listening and I hope you will too.

Check out other posts from Weedist’s Great Music While High series!