Info
- Artist:: Tom Waits
- Album:: Closing Time
- Year:: 1973
- Label:: Asylum
- Catalog:: SD 5061
Track Ratings
| # | Title | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Ol’ ‘55 | ★★ |
| A2 | I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You | ★★ |
| A3 | Virginia Avenue | |
| A4 | Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards) | ★★ |
| A5 | Midnight Lullaby | |
| A6 | Martha | ★★ |
| B1 | Rosie | ★★ |
| B2 | Lonely | ★ |
| B3 | Ice Cream Man | Ⓧ |
| B4 | Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love) | |
| B5 | Grapefruit Moon | ★★★ |
| B6 | Closing Time | ★★★ |
Log
2016-05-30
well today was full of emotions
and now i’m back at equilibrium. nice!
★ ol 55 is warm and nice
★★ i hope that i don’t fall in love with you! what happened to his voice? why did he opt for that affect?
★ old shoes. i guess this was before he got into büts
midnight lullaby is ok, even with the reference
★★ martha has a really pretty melody too (though it gets a bit much by the end)
★★ rosie! i feel it. i feel the lonely pop. i feel the melancholic underlayer. i feel it being aware of its own death, even as it lives.
★ lonely. yes.
(ice cream man: wait no)
★★ closing time. this is . i love this.
this is beautiful. i love this.
thank you.
2017-05-01
what happened on 5/30/16? it woulda been a monday. it woulda been memorial day.
★★ ol’ 55
★★ old shoes is wonderful too. i think i’m solidly in “time to make myself love this” territory
★ midnight lullaby
how do you even write a melody like martha.
★ little trip to heaven
★★ and grapefruit moon has been proven great
and closing time is still beautiful. maybe it’s because it sounds like it could have been his last song. classic tom.
Notes
review of closing time
taken from 2018 scratchpad
So how old are you?
“23.”
Really?
“Yeah!”
’Cause you look a lot older.
“Oh yeah? Great!”
You look like about 45.
“Yeah, I kinda feel like 60…”
https://youtu.be/zdzY49xlvdY?t=167 - tom waits, as played by beck
there’s a sort of pretension in tom’s first album. his very first words are “well, my time went so quickly” and in the background of his closer (fittingly, “closing time”) you can hear him dedicate the song “for posterity.” this is his very first album yet he treats it like it’s his swan song! and i know they say to live each day like it’s your last but…
he wanted to make something timeless. he wanted to write what we now call standards. sure, they were once new, but the thought of something like “fly me to the moon” once being on the charts seems almost like a blemish on its reputation. no, it’s best to think of these songs as having been passed down by the ancients of old – as relics set in stone, like everything else that existed since before you were born.
on the music side of things, he definitely has the chops to sell the trick. the melodies here come and go with an effortlessness that makes you really think they could’ve been plucked from lost songbooks. and in his efforts to adapt these unremembered standards for a modern audience he finds ways to make them his own, for better or worse. though typically this is accomplished through his penchant for pastiche, as evidenced by him garishly inserting the melody of hush little baby near the end of midnight lullaby, and i still don’t know what’s up with ice cream man. it’s in these moments that the illusion breaks, revealing in its absence a youthful inexperience that he tried so hard to cover up.
so maybe these songs aren’t much more than just conventionally beautiful. still, when all the pieces come together and the illusion is rebuilt – as it is on grapefruit moon – it takes your breath away.
but then we get to the lyrics, and, well… i’ve heard it said that there’s a certain depth to one’s writing that only time can bring, and while i’m still too young to know for certain, this album might be a pretty good argument for it being true. maybe we can look at martha for this one: a song about reconnecting with a star-crossed lover decades after the paths of each had diverged. it’s a nice idea for a song, and there’s something genuinely moving in the story it tells.
unfortunately, allowing yourself to be moved by its story requires not looking too closely at some of these lyrics, and also being ok with hearing “we were all so young and foolish, now we are mature” drawn out with the utmost sentimentality. otherwise, it makes you realize that, really, the entire conceit of martha is a bit ridiculous given that tom wrote it when he was at most 22. like here he is, barely old enough to buy drinks in the bars he’s playing in, writing songs about wistfully remembering one’s reckless youth before he’s even gotten to live much of his own!
still, i can’t help but love this album. alas, i’m a sucker for pretty melodies.
perhaps one problem with pledging devotion to the legends is that, when it comes time to write your own, you only know those stories that have already been told. in a few years he’d realize this, and he’d abandon his ballads to secure the monopoly on hobo clowns. but for now we can enjoy the aspirant, the a+ student who swallowed the lie that he was destined for greatness. to be fair, they say that to every precocious pupil, but this time it turns out that they were actually right.
4.0 ★★★★
on the official tom waits wit & wisdom page (yes this exists) he shares an anecdote about going to a music store, expecting to be recognized, and feeling a bit let down when he isn’t. a week later he drives out to the dump, and people recognize him before he even leaves the car.
i think this is telling.