Closing Time

All right, so here begins the Tom Waits marathon. I actually started going at it last night, trying to get ahead so I would actually have time to listen to his whole discography by Sunday night, but I got side-tracked... by Tom Waits. I put on Closing Time, then just had to listen to it 3 times in a row, and again this morning. Yeah, it is that good. I mean, the guy was seriously starting his singer-songwriter career with a loud bang, and this is certainly one of the exciting debut album I can think of. It is usually just him playing on the piano and singing, with some upright bass here and there, acoustic guitar, and quite a few songs with a neat and pretty string orchestration. It's only after listening to it now that I realised just how lovely the trumpet parts are too.

So, what you need to know about it is that is was released in March 1973 on Asylum, and was produced by Jerry Yester (a good name in my book, since the guy also produced Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello and Happy Sad). Tom must have been around 23-24 at the time, so yeah, he would have had some amount of life experience, but yet, I can't help but feel that the songs on that album showed a lot more maturity and insight than one would expect from such a brand new artist. If it was one of the last album I got of his, it was actually a cover of a song from it that got me into him. I had heard his name (and I think I already had Nighthawks At The Dinner too by then), usually whispered in quiet admiration, but it was really once I realised that Hootie & The Blowfish's I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You on Scattered, Smothered and Covered had been written by him that he really struck my curiosity.

Most of Closing Time are love songs, which makes me wonder how come, despite all the respect he gets from different artists, why he never made it into the mainstream realms. It starts with Ol' 55, a bittersweet song about leaving the one you love in bed in the morning "wishing the night would stay a little longer". The sort of song that should speak to anyone who ever had to hang up or kiss goodbye the person they love. I Hope That I Don't ... is a sweet little thing of beauty about falling in love, well, feeling a connection with a complete stranger, in this case, a patron of a bar you're frequenting, yet being too shy to do anything about it.

Old Shoes (& Picture Postcard) is also about love, but leaving one behind because the road calls you. So is Martha, a wonderful piece about a man calling back a woman he loved 40 years ago when "all (he) had was you and all (she) has was (him) when there was no tomorrow. Rosie, which has a dash of a country feel, is more about being left by a girl with only "a melody", and is followed by Lonely, an echoed piano thing about feeling even lonelier than one would think possible. Little Trip To Heaven, with its star and skies allusion reminded me of Blue Moon, in which the trumpet really shone.

There's also quite a few songs with a bit more of a jazzy feel, which sort of lead the way into the follow up album. Closing time is a particularly satisfying way to end an album. If I remember what I read about it correctly, it was just basically a song they wrote in the studio just for the cheer pleasure of it, to add an extra song to the record, yet it is one of the most delightful moments on the album for me personally. "Let's do this for posterity" Tom says just as they are about to start playing it. Hell yeah.