Day After Tomorrow
Tom Waits’ “Day After Tomorrow” might be the greatest anti-war song ever written. It’s hard to imagine a more thoughtful, heart-wrenching commentary about what it means to be a soldier, and more specifically what it means to be away from home and everyone you love.
Whether I am referencing my own songwriting, or someone else’s, I am fascinated at how difficult it is to write “perfect” songs, and how even those songwriters we consider masters fail routinely. It’s kind of like a professional bowler: The greatest ones only bowl perfect games every so often, but they have a more significant chance of doing so simply by how often they bowl strikes.
Much like perfect games, it’s so difficult to write “perfect” songs because of how easily you can go awry. You can do nine things right, but leave a pocket-8 pin (bowlers know what I'm talking about), or turn your wrist slightly, follow through a little less than you should, or literally miss your mark. In song language, you can botch a lyric, or choose the wrong chord, or even some weird combination of intangible things —why does a I-IV-V chord progression sound incredible in one song, but in another sounds overused and cheesy?
“Day After Tomorrow” puts us in the shoes of an unnamed soldier from Rockford, Illinois, fighting overseas and missing everyone and everything at home. As mentioned in “All the Small Things” a couple of weeks ago, the song uses the emotions of this individual soldier as the means by which to describe the terribleness of war. Waits lets these very-relatable emotions define the song, not the character’s —or the songwriter’s— distaste for the war itself. The soldier isn't preachy, he is just really, really sad.
Place “Day After Tomorrow” next to another Waits anti-war song: “Road to Peace” —an Israel/Palestine affair that puts every entity, including then-president George W. Bush, on blast. “Road to Peace” reads more like a media outlet hyping its story with gory headlines and manipulative details concerning little children’s blackened skeletons and young militants’ youthful innocence (“he was an excellent student; he studied so hard; it was as if he had a future”). “Road to Peace” is a lot of things; subtle it is not.
These two songs offer very different approaches to the anti-war tradition, but both illustrate how tiny details can define an entire song. “If God is great, and if God is good, why can’t He change the hearts of men?” is the sort of lyric that would sound really compelling were it coming from the unnamed soldier in “Day After Tomorrow;” it would read as an earned skepticism stemming from his situation. But from the narrator in “Road to Peace,” it sounds almost mocking, as if the narrator is so angry with all this violent evidence that he now can set his sights on the Almighty, and bask confidently in the cynicism.
The gentler narrator in “Day After Tomorrow” eventually sets his sights on God, too, but with a beaten down sadness rather than anger: “Tell me, how does God choose? Whose prayers does he refuse? Who turns the wheel, who throws the dice, on the day after tomorrow?” Both of these worlds —internal and external— are their own sort of hell.
You could argue that without the gruesome details listed out so bluntly in “Road to Peace,” the final question about God would feel unearned. Asking whether God is really in charge is a big question to justify asking in the span of a seven-minute song. The only two ways you can is to go outward and abrasive (“Road to Peace”), or inward and introspective (“Day After Tomorrow”). It’s either all about the external destruction, or the internal turmoil.
But how easy it all falls apart. What makes “Day After Tomorrow” so powerful is the tension Waits creates by manipulating the timeline. Had he simply chosen “tomorrow” as the soldier’s arrival, the song becomes hopeful. But it’s not tomorrow; it’s the day after. And so the song becomes a much different beast. We don’t know if our narrator makes it another two days; forty-eight hours is a long time in a war zone.
I love how this small lyrical choice changes the entire complexion of the song, and by extension, how every decision you make as a songwriter can totally alter the direction of a piece. While this is intriguing from a craft standpoint, it’s equally intriguing from a mystical standpoint: A song is as much a byproduct of the moment you sit down to write it as it is of your skills as a craftsmen, giving every song ever written a kind of predestined fate about it.
Some artists believe that we are simply the conduit for the work we create, as if a piece of art has always existed out in the cosmos and we are the entity that brings it into tangible reality. Even on my most mystical days, I don’t know that I believe that exact thing, but no matter how I push back against it, I can’t argue away just how inexplicable the creative process is sometimes, or how everything that happens (after the billions of events before it) can not inherently feel predestined. Perhaps that's another question for the Almighty.