Hanging Out the Window With A Bottle Full of Rain Dogs
Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs is a trip down every back alley you can conceive of, a gathering place for every flavor of ne’er-do-well who can get himself together long enough to come stumbling out of the gutter. We’ve got captains and sailors enroute to Singapore, deranged family trees, and bounce around from Harlem to New Orleans to Minneapolis, to unmarked alleys and evening trains. There are nineteen tracks of wilderness, each one taking you farther and farther away from your lamppost.
All of this movement makes the lyrics of “Blind Love” feel like the album’s thesis: “If you get far enough away, you’ll be on your way back home.” Rain Dogs was the first Waits album I ever listened to, buying a copy at Best Buy on an otherwise unremarkable night in 2007.
I felt like I was far, far away from my home when that whacked-out percussion of “Singapore” hit my ears for the first time. What I didn’t feel like was that I was beginning my relationship with my favorite musician. It’s easy to fall into the trap of gawking at Waits like one would a circus freak show, but to focus on that persona —a persona he absolutely has leaned into at every possible opportunity— is to do an immeasurable disservice to what sits beneath the Cookie Monster growling, over-dramatizations, and sonic discord.
Looking back through my catalog, I am trying to find a song where I was —loosely, obviously— trying to imitate Tom Waits in the songwriting. I can see where I shot for Colin Meloy, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Mark Knopfler, Kristian Mattson, and Townes van Zandt. But Waits is remarkably absent from this exercise. I don’t know what exactly that means, if it means anything. But it kind of goes back to the gawking, I think. It’s those few moments in your life when you look around, are so completely overwhelmed by what is happening in front of you, that it seems almost a perversion to do anything else but just look on in astonishment.
Maybe that’s what defines our favorites of anything — the few things that you don’t try to imitate; the few things so unassailable that say to you; “You can’t possibly be me; go be you.” And by saying that, they inform everything you do. Maybe that’s why I can’t find Tom Waits in any one of my songs; it’s because he’s in all of them