Why I Love Tom Waits

There are a number of things I dig about Tom Waits’s music – his ability to tell a story, his love for the odd and the strange, his ability to switch between his dirty baritone and equally dirty falsetto, his eclectic use of pre-rock music like carnival, theatre and blues, his embrace of the singer-as-entertainer, how he gives everything he’s got in every performance, and his restlessness.

But what I love most about Tom Waits is the statement his body of work makes about restoration, renewal, and redemption. He has a knack for taking the ugly and the repulsive things, the old and the worn out things, as well as the rubbish and scraps, and through sheer creativity turning them into something beautiful. In many of his songs the percussion is provided literally by pots and pans and garbage-tin lids, while a four-string guitar and worn out piano accordion play the melody. I can imagine Tom scouring an alley way for the perfectly disgusting garbage-tin lid, or the stalls of a gypsy fair for the weirdest, most thoroughly broken instrument he can find. These all form the perfect backdrop for his songs which tell tales of tales of tragic, cruel, lonely and odd people. Tom’s voice itself is the centrepiece of this picture: a rough, dried out, gravelly throat, that sounds as though he has been living on a diet of bourbon, cigarettes and nails for the past week, that can hold notes for bars which are nothing more than him gargling on a piece of phlegm at the back of his throat.  And it’s beautiful. He brings all these broken things together to create song after song which I just love.

He reminds me of a God who similarly has a knack for taking the ugly and the repulsive things, the old and the worn out things, as well as the rubbish and the scraps, and through an act of creativity turning them into something beautiful. A God who still says, ‘Behold, I am making all things new’ (Revelation 21:5).

Francis Schaeffer once said:

Some artists may not know that they are consciously showing forth a world view. Nonetheless, a world view shows through…In any case, whether the artist is conscious of the world view or not, to the extent that it is there is it to be judged on such basis…No artist can say everything he might want to say or build everything he might want to build in a single work…Therefore, we cannot judge an artist’s work from one piece…We must judge an artist’s performance and an artist’s world view on the basis of as much of the artist’s work as we can.”  — Art and the Bible (1973)

On this basis, I recommend Bone Machine and Mule Variations to the uninitiated.