Pick A Door, Any Door
Lately I've found myself listening almost obsessively to Tom Waits. I was pulled into his orbit last year by the intoxicating strangeness and over-the-top macabre madhouse feeling of his song “In The Coliseum” (from 1992's Bone Machine), which serves as a tour of a world where chaos and bloodthirst are given their due without compunction. The howling, the jeering, and the fatalistic glee of its tale were the sort of deliberate and cartoonish extremity that can make a person like me feel safe liking something.
As I was drawn in, I started to hear more of the shading and nuance in the other songs on the album, and to understand the role of a song like “Coliseum’ in context of his world. The doomed clanging and the sardonic wit that typify Waits’ later records are on fullest display on Bone Machine, from the apocalyptic fear of opening tracks “The Earth Died Screaming” and “Dirt In The Ground” to the railyard-adjacent exhaustion of “A Little Rain” and “Who Are You This Time”. This was no cartoon, no tiny spectacle of ultraviolence whose only purpose is to eviscerate polite existence — this album is a complete world, peopled by the exhausted, downtrodden, sick, and deranged, but also full of tender hope, small joys, and overwhelming passion.
What I found as I listened was that this song that had initially drawn me in so thoroughly was coming to feel less like a standout declaration and more like a lark, impishly stuck into the album’s sequence to let listeners dance in a gleeful and abandoned corner of its broken world. It’s important because it’s a door through which we may enter, should we find ourselves nearby. In the song “Murder In The Red Barn” Waits even uses similar language to make the same observation:
Now thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house
Or covet thy neighbor’s wife
But for some
Murder is the only door through which they enter life
Going to the extremes is,in cases like this, a gesture of welcome to those who haven’t necessarily lived anywhere else. And once you've met them at the door, it’s easier for them to come inside and see what else your hospitality has to offer. That’s the beauty in the art of the carefully-chosen album single — finding just the right invitation to extend to an audience who need to hear a good story before they let their guard down and listen to what you've got to say.
Listening to Bone Machine now, I often skip straight past these songs and on to the more straightforward melancholy of songs like “Whistle Down The Wind” and “That Feel” which toss off the ferocity and catastrophic vision of other tracks in favor of plaintive honesty about the weight of burdens that any man might recognize from his own life. These are songs that feel old and wise like some kind of grandfather, speaking in overflowing references to the excitement of a life that once so closely resembled my own. I honestly don’t think I could have heard them at all without that introductory horrorshow to put me at ease, and I definitely wouldn’t have gone back to explore his earlier albums, where I’ve found hints at further wisdom and commiseration. Thank God for that bloodstained axe in the barn.
