The Elusive Genius Of Tom Waits’ Songwriting & Music And Personal Takeaways

An artist who creates an interwoven story with his lyrics and music; with songs of places, uncanny characters, alcohol, bars, gamblers, clubs and relatable and fictional situations, who sounds like he’s perpetually been nursing a hangover and who has been fittingly dubbed ‘the poet of the night’, Tom Waits’ music and songwriting never fail to leave you bemused, enthralled and get you grooving.

“Waits is a practitioner of the fine art of conversation, spinning yarns like a carny or a Depression-era hobo ridin’ the rails toward some unforsaken promised land… Wait’s spoken rap is as compelling as his diamond-precision lyrics. He becomes at times a synthesis of inflections that reflect a who’s who of verbal influences: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Louis Armstrong, some anonymous vaudevillian huckster, a pool hall attendant, hobo, folkie, Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski, Dean Moriarty or the anonymous singers of the Library of Congress folk songs recorded by Alan Lomax.”

— Paul Maher on Tom Waits

Waits’ lyrical genius and process of songwriting is in an island on its own when it comes to its originality and style and which stands out in the vast sea of musicians who are celebrated songwriters.

Speaking about how his songs come to life, Waits says:

“Sometimes a song just comes out of nowhere. Other times you chase one song for a couple of days and then you wind up with nothing. Then you have to bring them back from where you found them, and sometimes they escape. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they get sick first and then die. Sometimes they kill you.

I don’t really know where songs come from. They kinda come from all kinds of places. You build them out of things you see and remember and find and felt before.

Some songs come out of the ground like a potato. Others, it’s like paper mache. I got to get the flour out, I got to get dirty. And it makes you mad with some songs….

It’s always good to whip the songs a little bit, scare them and then make fun of them, and then they change. You come back the next day and they’re better behaved.”

Waits elaborates on his tendency to amalgamate his lyrics with distinctly darker outlines, lyrics and themes, that fall back on the smooth grooves of jazz which make the songs perfectly balanced and easier to listen to and digest.

He says:

“I think all songs should have weather in them, names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.

Every song needs to be anatomically correct. You need weather, you need the name of the town, something to eat. Every song needs certain ingredients to be balanced. You’re writing a song and you need a town and you look out the window and you see St. Louis Cardinals on some kid’s t-shirt. You said, okay, we’ll use that.

I’ve always loved songs of adventure. Murder ballads, songs about shipwrecks and terrible acts of depravity and heroism. Erotic tales of seductions. Songs of romance, wild courage and mystery. Everyone has tried at one time or another to live inside a song. Songs where people died for love, songs of people on the run, songs of ghost ships or bank robberies. I’ve always wanted to live inside songs and never come back.

Most (songs) fail miserably. I go looking in other people’s songs for their sailors and their towns. Everybody has things they gravitate toward. Some people put toy cars or clouds or cat crap. Everybody puts something different, and it’s entirely up to you what belongs and what doesn’t. Songs are interesting little vessels of emotional information, and you carry them in your pocket like a bagel.”

Speaking about something Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke also explained in an interview I saw of his, where Yorke plays the motifs and songs for his loved ones, wife, kids, etc and observes their reactions to the songs and then finds ‘something in that’, Waits explains how his wife since 1980, Kathleen Brennan, helps him in his songwriting process. He says:

“My wife’s like a cross between Eudora Welty and Joan Jett. Kathleen’s a rhododendron, an orchid, an oak. She’s got the four Bs: Beauty, brightness, bravery and brains. She rescued me. I’d be playing in a steak house right now if it weren’t for her. Actually, I wouldn’t even be playing in a steakhouse. I’d be cooking in a steakhouse.

She’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck.

Oh, you know, You wash, I’ll dry. It all comes down to making choices and a lot of decisions. Are we going to do a song about a cruise ship, or a meadow, or a brothel or… just a rhapsody, or is it a parlor song, or a work song, or a field holler? What is it?

The form itself is like a Jell-O mold. It’s like doing anything that you would do with someone: You hold it right there, while I hit it, or the other way around. You find a rhythm in the way of working.

I trust her opinion above all else. You’ve got to have somebody to trust, that knows a lot. She’s done a lot of things. I’m Ingrid Bergman and she’s Bogart. She’s got a pilot’s license and she was going to be a nun before we got married. I put an end to that.

She knows about everything from motorcycle repair to high finance, and she’s an excellent pianist. One of the leading authorities on the African violet. She’s a lot of strong material. She’s like Superwoman, standing there with her cape flapping. It works.

We’ve been at this for some time now. Sometimes you quarrel, and it’s the result of irritation, and sometimes it comes out of the ground like a potato, and we marvel at it.”

While explaining whether a song changes or evolves from a certain stage or if they take a new shape if they’ve been around too long, Waits says:

“Yes, it’s like giving away a box of clothes and then you get them back and think, `Hey, those pants, I liked those pants, that shirt, I always liked that shirt!.’ I never really recorded them, we just did rough demos and then you give the songs to someone else to do and then either they do them in a delightful way or they particularly butcher them. And I have to say, I was glad to get them back. I forgot I like these tunes.

Sometimes I’ll listen to records of my own stuff and I think, `God ,the original idea for this was so much better than the mutation that we arrived at. What I’m trying to do now is get what comes through, and keep it alive.’

It’s like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all and sometimes, by the time you get to the studio, you have nothing.

There’s a certain kind of musical dexterity that you can arrive at that actually punishes a certain point in your development, or moves past it, It happens all the time with me, the three-chord syndrome.

And then if you try to ask a Barney Kessel to cut a simple thing, just a big block brick of chords, just dirty, fat, loud, mean and cryptic — no, he’s a hand-writer. He’s developed to that level.

Larry Taylor, this bass player I work with from Canned Heat, if he can’t feel it, will put down his bass and walk away, and say: ‘That’s it, man. I can’t get it. And I really respect that. I said, ‘Well,thank you for telling me.’ ”

On using unconventional and odd instruments and motifs and strange sonics in his music, Waits says:

I like to step on the negative, grind it into the gutter, and then put that through the projector. I always love that. It’s what Keith Richards calls `the hair in the gate at a movie.’ You know, when everybody’s watching a movie and all of a sudden a piece of hair catches in the projector and everyone’s going, `Wow. Wow! Look at that!’ And then that was the most exciting moment in the film.

It’s like an orchestra tuning up. Sometimes those are the most interesting points in the evening’s performance, when those guys were tuning up. You really had something there and when you started to play the music, it left.

Talking about how he approaches albums while trying to keep things fresh and interesting, Waits says:

Well, you do the dishes first. You want it to be fresh in some way. I don’t want to repeat myself. it’s always a little bit of something old and something new — except I don’t record with great frequency so, with the time that’s gone between records, you can’t avoid having gone through some changes. I think you get more confident with your process — even though you’re trying to change the process, you know?

Because I don’t cook the same way every time. Sometimes I put the turkey in one side of my mouth and the tomato in the other side and I just chew it up in the car. Other times you spend the whole evening making a meal and it’s gone in fifteen minutes. I don’t know, maybe it’s a different identity that you get? Everybody has a growing edge — you know, where the growth stops on the plant and the new branch comes out.

Explaining how he has evolved from composing music and songs on the piano, Waits explains:

I don’t play the piano much anymore. I don’t compose on it. It’s hard. Because sometimes it feels like it’s all made out of ice. It’s cold. It’s square. So much about it is square, you know, and music is round. So sometimes I think it puts corners on your stuff.

Speaking about how the creative process and the creative freedom and liberty as a songwriting artist and musician, Waits says:

“You can change everything if you want. If you don’t like the way something is going, you can totally change the bone structure of a song, or three or four songs in the way they all work together. The thing I hate about recording is that it’s so permanent. Ultimately you have to let it dry, and I hate that, cause I like to just keep changing the shape of them and cut them in half and use the parts that I don’t want on that one another one.

That’s the part that drives everybody crazy. I like to get in there with the songs and eat them up and push them around and explore all the variables.

Sometimes it sounds Irish and then you tilt it a little bit this way and it sounds more Balinese, and over here it sounds more Romanian. I like that part of working with music; you can find yourself in a different latitude and longitude.

There’s a lot of different coordinates for rhythm, and when you start exploring rhythms, you find that maybe it sounds Chinese, and then you realize it’s just kind of like banging sticks on the ground, it’s just something that comes naturally. You don’t necessarily have to put it in a particular country. Some of these things come out of your own rubber dream.

I listen to things and break a piece off of this, and a piece off of this, and I tie this to that, put these two together and then I take them off to meet the pieces coming down from the top and wrap it all in newspaper and set it on fire.

It’s like making a record. You don’t really finish, you just stop. You just keep painting it and doing things to it and eventually you have to stop.”

About his ‘poet of the night’ tag, Waits rather whimsically suggests:

Well, as far as being the poet of the night, if you want to know about the night, go ask a cop. Or a paramedic, a fireman, a night clerk, a newsboy, a bartender, a waitress, or a club owner. They will tell you about the night. Ask the people who sweep up after you, or ask the people who sweep you up.

Takeaways As A Musician Myself

Waits’ nuances and notions and take on the whole process is extremely interesting and helpful to create music with his exemplary example and as a benchmark to aspire to. The creative process is different for every musician and as a musician who has just begun writing songs, I’ve just begun to hit the tip of the ice berg.

My songs are rather simple in their design and conception and I don’t spend too much time on the process and as I put it, I ‘sh*t out songs pretty fast’. But I have written songs that are deep and meaningful but I struggle with melodies for them which blur into similar sounds from one song to the next and the songs I’ve recorded so far aren’t very elaborate, descriptive or using all my influences and inspirations, and at the moment, not up to my standards and potential which I know is there in me, just waiting to be put out there.

I’m fairly certain that Waits has influenced Thom Yorke, because of the lyrics written by Waits in the song ‘Clap Hands’ which are ‘they all went to heaven in a little row boat’ which Yorke has used in Radiohead’s ‘Pyramid Song’.

That being said, Waits’ example and influence is pushing me to write more compelling, captivating and unique songs. Like Waits puts it more ‘sailors, murder, exploration, the night, etc’

Other influences of mine include Thom Yorke and Mark Knopfler when it comes to songwriting and of course Yorke’s piano playing and Knopfler’s guitar playing.

However, Waits’ songwriting is exceptional, and a breath of fresh air with every song of his that you listen to, other than the fact that his whispery, whiskey-drenched voice is singing them, which is the only constant.

There’s something about musicians from New York City(A city I would like to live in, because it’s a lot like Bombay) who use people, places, experiences and stories in their songwriting: think Lou Reed, Norah Jones, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z etc.

Their lyrics have their own pervading effect and individuality with just enough uniqueness and flavour that keep things interesting and which are different like a sudden change in the weather. But Waits is surely a cut above the names that I’ve mentioned.

However, coming back, I really can’t write a song about ‘Five Gardens’(A place in Bombay close to my home) when New York and America in general have cooler names for places, like I can’t say ‘Down in Kerala’ when I could say ‘Down in Louisiana’ but I could perhaps use ‘Marine Drive’ but yea, I’m just starting to scratch the surface with my songwriting…..

Also having a girlfriend to help me with the process is something I naturally need and want given that the best musicians I’ve studied like Yorke, Waits, Reed, Knopfler and others have explained how much of telling difference having a loved one to assist and inspire the process makes…..

The trick is trying to incorporate all my influences and experiences into each song, which will only come with time, practice and patience.

But the takeaways from writing this piece and listening to Waits’ 1985 album ‘Rain Dogs’ while writing this are definitely going to go into the melting pot when I’m creating newer songs. And yes, just like Waits, I’m a heavy smoker too…..

Buy yea, Waits remains an elusive songwriting genius and quite rightly a celebrated musician who has set the bar high for songwriting and composition.

Here are the lyrics to ‘Jockey Full Of Bourbon’

Edna million in a drop dead suit
Dutch pink on a downtown train
Two dollar pistol but the gun won’t shoot
I’m in the corner on the pouring rain
Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest
I been drinking from the broken cup
Two pairs of pants and a mohair vest
I’m full of bourbon and I can’t stand up

Schiffer broke a bottle on Morgan’s head
I’m stepping on the devil’s tail
Across the stripes of a full moon’s head
All through the bar’s of a Cuban jail
Bloody finger’s on a purple knife
Flamingo drinking from a cocktail glass
I’m on the lawn with someone else’s wife
Admire the view from the top of the mast

Yellow sheets on a Hong Kong bed
Stazybo horn and a slingerland ride
To the carnival is what she said
A couple hundred dollars makes it dark inside

Edna million in a drop dead suit
Dutch pink on a downtown train
Two dollar pistol but the gun won’t shoot
I’m in the corner on the pouring rain

Hey little bird , fly away home
Your house is on fire , your children alone
Hey little bird , you fly away home
Your house is on fire , your children alone

And here’s ‘Till The Money Runs Out’

Check this strange beverage fall out from the sky
Splashin’ Baghdad on the Hudson in Panther Martin’s eyes
He’s high and outside wearin’ candy apple red
Scarlet gave him twenty seven stitches in his head

With a pint of green Chartreuse, ain’t nothin’ seems right
You buy the Sunday paper on a Saturday night

Can’t you hear the thunder? Someone stole my watch
I sold a quart of blood and bought a half a pint of scotch
Someone tell those Chinamen on Telegraph Canyon Road
When you’re on the bill with the spoon, there ain’t no time to unload

So bye bye, baby, baby, bye bye

Droopy stranger, lonely dreamer, toy puppy and the Prado
We’re laughin’ as they piled into Olmos’ El Dorado
Jesus whispered, “Eni meany meany miney moe”
They’re too proud to duck their heads that’s why they bring it down so low

So bye bye, baby, baby, bye bye

Pointed man smack dab in the middle of July
Swingin’ from the rafters in his brand new tie
He said, “I can’t go back to that hotel room, all they do is shout
But listen baby, I’ll stay with you ’til the money runs out”

So bye bye, baby, baby, bye bye, bye bye, bye
Bye, bye bye, baby, baby, bye bye
Bye bye, baby, baby, bye bye

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