Train Song

We all know Tom Waits is a weirdo. He’s established that a long time ago, and he’s also established a long-running side hustle quirking up the movies, including multiple collaborations with Jim Jarmusch and a truly iconic cameo in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. The 1988 concert film Big Time did a lot to establish the image of Waits as a kind of infernal dark-cabaret emcee, which in turn established him as the thinking-person’s troubadour. All of which is impeccably cool, of course, but it may be a distraction from the songwriting. Because, as the minor cottage industry of Tom Waits covers has shown, beneath the image are songs that hold up under any kind of interpretation. Many of them were never even that weird to begin with. Many of them are essentially just blues songs, which speak to things that haven’t changed much over a century, like bum luck and the universal urge to jump on the next train out of here.