Tag: Tom Waits

‘Nirvana’ by Charles Bukowski, as read by Tom Waits

Accompanied by a softly wheezing organ, Waits’ reading of Bukowski’s uncharacteristically meditative poem about a young man riding on a bus, “cut loose from purpose”, is suitably tender and gruffly sympathetic. When the bus stops at a roadside café the young man experiences a revelatory moment of perfect happiness, feeling that “everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful.” But despite his vow to stay in that clean, well-lighted place, he follows the other passengers into the bus when it’s time to reboard, and continues on his way. The world we have is too often the world we have failed to escape.

The poem was first published in The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Black Sparrow Press 1992; the audio version is collected on Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, ANTI Records 2006, and can be heard here

‘What’s He Building?’ by Tom Waits

I don’t know if anyone has ever proposed an analogue for the prose poem in the occasional spoken-word tracks you get on rock albums, but Tom Waits is a master of this resting-the-vocal-cords mode. He has said of this track, from Mule Variations(1999), that it was a tribute to the “word jazz” of Ken Nordine: “I wasn’t able to get it to fly as a song, so I just took the words and started saying them”. The result is an intimately creepy narration that wavers in and out of rhyming couplets, like the speaker of a Browning monologue gone to seed, revealing as much about his own paranoia as about the neighbour he is spying on: “What’s he building in there? I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children”. I first heard it around 2001, when I briefly lived in the States, and its growling menace — delivered over a clanging soundscape of midnight DIY — seems prophetic of the domestic paranoia that would grip the country after 9/11. The way Waits stretches out the phrase “he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia” oozes bar-stool xenophobia. 

First released on the album Mule Variations, Anti-, 1999 and available here