Summertime Words and Music, 2023

I recommend a book and a career’s worth of (challenging) music

Tom Waits is honored and performs at the PEN/Song Lyrics Awards for Literary Excellence honoring John Prine and Kathleen Brennan & Tom Waits at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on September 19, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

The news never stops in the 2020s, so there’s really no such thing as the “summer doldrums” people used to talk about when I was a kid. There’s plenty going on in the political world this July, and so plenty of material for substantive posts about politics. But it’s also hot, and humid, and sometimes stormy. And days and weeks off lurk around corners, luring us with the promise of happy lethargy—of time away from writing and reading about the news.

In that spirit, here are a couple of recommendations for you, my loyal readers—one of them a new book you really should buy, read, and think deeply about; the other, fifty-years’ worth of music by an artist whose beautiful and difficult work means the world to me.

Self Swallows All

Do you know the writing of Tara Isabella Burton? Well, you should. She has a Ph.D. in theology from Oxford University, but she’s the furthest thing from an academic, supporting herself as a prolific full-time writer who manages to excel in both fiction and nonfiction. In all honesty, I can’t speak to the quality of her first two novels, or her forthcoming one. But I can tell you that her first book of nonfiction, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, was so good that I constructed a semester-long critical-writing seminar around it at Penn. And her latest book—Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians—is even better.

Burton lives and writes with her eyes and ears wide open, taking in seemingly everything around her—politics, economics, religion (all viewed through a capacious sociological/anthropological lens), and especially the teeming, swirling, churning blur of our culture, from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs, and every gradation in between. She has opinions and offers gracefully subtle judgments about what she sees and hears, but unlike so many of her contemporaries, she would rather describe and analyze than denounce or excommunicate. I suspect that’s because she’s that rarest of things these days: a genuine skeptic and pluralist who sees partial goods and evils, partial gains and losses, partial truths and half-acknowledged lies, all around her. Instead of children of light and children of darkness, she sees a world shot through with complication and complexity, and people struggling mightily to find their way through it as best they can.

The subject of Self-Made is all of us—modern men and women who no longer accept the legitimacy of natural or social givens. Each of us was born and raised with one set of genes or another, one gender or another, one race or another, one socioeconomic class or another, one religion or another (or no religion at all), and so on. But we tend to believe those givens are less limitations on our freedom to which we need to reconcile ourselves than material to be chosen or discarded at will as part of a process of self-fashioning and even self-deification, creating an identity and story for ourselves from all the possibilities we find scattered around us. We see our lives as precisely such a process—becoming who we are through an act of willful self-creation and self-affirmation.

This is a theme that’s long fascinated me, as I’ve reflected on the character of modern individualism and what one might call its spiritual and existential discontents. That’s ultimately what Burton is most interested in as well—or at least I think so—though she does something in her book very well that I’ve struggled with in trying to tackle the topic in my own writing down through the years, and that is to tell a fully fleshed out and synthesized cultural story of how self-making has come to such prominence in our world. (I tend to be overly tempted by the tidiness of an intellectual history focused on a handful of writers. Burton does much better, weaving together elite-level ideas with demotic and material developments.)  

In a series of brief and breezy chapters, Burton ranges widely through the past several centuries, touching on the original aristocratic version of the self-making ideal that first emerged in Europe, while spending the bulk of her time plumbing the depths of the democratic variation that arose in the United States and has now spread across so much of the globe. She’s especially good at exploring the way democratic self-fashioning often involves various forms of deception and self-deception. (Think of people presenting highly deceptive (edited) accounts of their lives, including the use of image filters, on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.) Somehow authenticity and artifice imply and inspire each other in the work of fashioning our identities.

Burton’s brief but highly suggestive conclusion points the way to what I hope will be her next project: an exploration of what the ideal of self-making misses. In a word, it downplays the social and communal sides of our natures—and the fact that we have given (bodily) natures that cannot be infinitely manipulated and transformed through acts of individual or collective will. As she puts it in her concluding pages:

[W]e have always been, and remain, human beings: caught between facticity and freedom, trying imperfectly to work out how to relate ourselves to both…. We are bound to a natural world we do not fully understand, to our bodies that so often betray us, to the communities that give us language and culture and shared senses of meaning, and to the interior longings and yearnings that vex and confuse us as often as they provide us with hope, joy, and purpose. Which part or parts of that tapestry ‘count’ as real? And which do we leave behind? And what do we lose once we do?

If those evocative sentences grab and move you, I hope you’ll buy and read Tara Isabella Burton’s new book—and wait impatiently, with me, for her next one, and the one after that.

Tom Waits For Me

A week or so ago, my news feed on Facebook, in its algorithmic wisdom, included an ad for the Fiftieth Anniversary vinyl edition of Closing Time by Tom Waits. It turns out the precise anniversary of the record was this past March, which is also when the new vinyl pressing was released. I’d missed that date, which is hardly surprising. I don’t listen to Waits every day, but I have been listening to him since I was six years old. That’s when my father brought home a copy of his newly released fourth album, Small Change (1976), and played it on the Hi-Fi in the living room of our Manhattan apartment. That was a shocking experience for my young ears. (I’ll explain why in a moment.) From that point on, I was hooked. I’ve been following his career ever since.

And what a career it’s been. Closing Time, which I discovered years later as a teenager when I borrowed it from the local library, was Waits’ debut. It was in some ways very different than the later album to which my father had introduced me. The earlier record was filled with mournful, melodically beautiful ballads accompanied most of the time by Waits’ piano playing, an acoustic bass, a muted, jazzy trumpet, and occasional string arrangements. Sometimes, as on “Ol’ 55,” which was covered by The Eagles at around the same time, the music had a smooth, laid-back, Laurel Canyon sound. But more often, it seemed to emanate from a smoky, beatnik-basement bar on a trash-strewn street in Greenwich Village or San Francisco. Waits’ slightly wavering croon was imperfect, but it suited the music and lyrics quite well, effectively conveying the sad, downcast longing of the characters that populated his songs. (Listen to “Martha” for a taste of his debut at its best.)

Waits’ next two records continued in a similar vein, marking him as one of the “singer-songwriters” getting very favorable press and some commercial success at the time. (His peers, it seemed, were James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Carly Simon.) But Small Change marked a dramatic change. Its opening track, a nearly seven-minute-long, richly orchestrated ballad called “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen),” begins with a lovely 20 seconds of piano and strings. That fits with what his previous records have led us to expect from him.

But then Waits begins to sing. The wavering, scrawny croon has vanished. In its place is a shockingly abrasive croak. The words “hoarse” and “raspy” don’t begin to describe it. Some have likened it Louis Armstrong’s craggy delivery, but that’s unfair to Satchmo. That the first words out of Waits’ newly mangled throat are “wasted and wounded” is fitting and no doubt intentional. Where Waits used to sing about the lives of people down on their luck, now he has become one of them, at least for the sake of the performance. We are listening to something akin to a derelict musical, with Waits taking the lead role. He’s terribly drunk, days or weeks into a bender in a foreign city, desperately trying to forget the woman who left him stooped over and in pain, suffering from a “wound that will never heal,” wearing “an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey,” and singing about it with the only voice he has left, straight from his heart to ours.  

As I said above, I first heard this music when I was six. It was more than a little scary at the time—such intense beauty intermingled with such ugliness, like a magnificent painting that’s been slashed and gouged with dagger. I didn’t know what to make of it. But I’m grateful my father exposed me to it at a young age, because it expanded my ear, opening it to possibilities I might have excluded had I first encountered it later in life.

As I grew up, obsessed with music, voraciously exploring everything I could get my hands on, I kept listening to Waits. Small Change and the three records that followed it were similar in sound and approach, mixing gorgeously lush, mangled ballads with peculiar upbeat tracks in which Waits mumbled, rapped, or scatted over walking bass lines. I’ve always preferred the ballads to these “Brawlers,” but the lyrics and vocalizing on the latter were sometimes path-breaking and downright hilarious, and always wildly uncommercial. (Take a listen to “Step Right Up” from Small Change for an especially brilliant example.)

But then things got even weirder. In 1980, Waits married musician Kathleen Brennan, who became his closest collaborator. She introduced him to the music of incorrigible experimenters Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch, and encouraged Waits to try experiments of his own with instrumentation, arrangements, song forms, and singing. The albums that followed—Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985), and Franks Wild Years (1987)—were very different than what came before, with Waits’ trademark piano and strings largely gone, replaced by Marc Ribot’s angular electric guitar textures and leads, various pieces of a brass section, and a wide range of percussive instruments. Waits’ voice, meanwhile, expanded in even more bizarre directions, blending its usual scarred and grumbled abrasiveness with chants, barks, and wheezes, sometimes “sung” through a bullhorn or megaphone.

His lyrics now delved even deeper into the lives and broken dreams of lowlifes, losers, drifters, orphans, outcasts, wounded soldiers, and the homeless and disabled—people residing on the distant margins of modern life. To listen to Waits in this period was to be transported into a junkyard world of the broken, places where radiant beauty and a cacophonous clatter blended in new and often shocking ways. And through it all, the lovely melodies kept pouring out of him, as Rod Stewart demonstrated by releasing a remarkably faithful cover of “Downtown Train” from Rain Dogs, turning it into a hit single in 1989.

Since the time of this creative peak, Waits has kept chugging along, releasing new music 2-3 times a decade, all of it interesting, some of it great. (I’m especially fond of Alice (2002), songs he wrote for the 1992 play of the same name, one of his several collaborations with experimental theater director Robert Wilson.) The sonic explorations have continued, and so have the gorgeous melodies. I have a mix of 44 Tom Waits ballads in my Apple Music account, spanning the decades of his career. They are some of the most beautiful and sadly moving songs I’ve ever heard, most of them sung with a voice that sounds like it’s been dragged for several months across a filthy street strewn with sandpaper and broken glass.

I’m terribly grateful for those songs, and for that singular voice. And also grateful, just a little, to Facebook, for bringing the Fiftieth Anniversary of Waits’ debut album to my attention. That’s a milestone I’m happy to commemorate in this post.

As a kind of postscript, I’ll encourage you to watch a three-minute video of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro talking about how listening to an especially beautiful and moving song by Tom Waits (“Ruby’s Arms” from 1980) inspired him to make a subtle but decisively important change to the conclusion of his great novel The Remains of the Day.