Tom Waits’ Top 5 Sad Bastard Songs

You’re innocent when you dream, Dude.

Keith R. Higgons posted a great piece yesterday about Sad Bastard Music.

Tom Waits writes songs that leave scars on you if you’re open to that sort of thing. People get the wrong idea — like wondering why he only writes about hobos, which isn’t true … read my satiric rebuttal of that canard — but one of the ideas they get right is that his songs are filled with, to use Keith’s phrase, sad bastards. Here are the top five sad bastard songs in Waits’ catalogue.

5. “Train Song” (Franks Wild Years)

It’s probably just a story about a wanderer who can’t get home, but it also might be an artful way to talk about suicide (“It was a train that took me away from here, but a train can’t bring me home.”) Either way, evokes that feeling of irrevocable decisions we make that separate us from those we love. The character of Frank is one of the great sad bastards in music.

4. “Cold Water” (Mule Variations)

Not all sad bastard songs have sad events in order to be sad bastard songs. This guy is one sad bastard, and lines like “police at the station and they don’t look friendly” and “found an old dog and he seems to like me” and “slept in the graveyard” are heartbreaking because of what they imply. Sad bastards can be accepting of their sad bastardness.

3. “Martha” (Closing Time)

Sad bastard songs don’t tend to be subtle and “Martha” excels in this regard. Tom calls the one that he walked away from years ago and he might be just checking up on her, and yeah things are okay, yeah, but … hey … is there any hope for us? Desperate and pathetic and pathetique, and the day it doesn’t raise a tear in this 53-year-old’s eye is the day I am dead.

2. “Poor Edward” (Alice)

Wow, man. This song. I don’t know. Based on a true story. This fan video just destroys me. How can such a thing of desolation exist in the world?

1. “Ruby’s Arms” (Heartattack and Vine)

Perhaps the most earnestly beautiful song on this list. You don’t need to know why he’s leaving, except he broke her heart and maybe she’ll forgive him but he can’t forgive himself. And his frustration at the weather (“Jesus Christ this goddamn rain!”) is a moment I’ve lived. Everything is going to shit and you’ve got this fucking rain, too?

People get confused because, whatever the song is, Tom Waits is playing a sad bastard character while on stage. And some songs have sad bastard bits, but aren’t really sad bastard songs. “A Little Rain,” for example, has the line, “She was fifteen years old and she had never seen the ocean,” which I haven’t been able to listen to without choking up since my own daughters were teenagers.

Thanks to Keith R. Higgons for the inspiration.