Song 71: Take It With Me

aka Time waits for Tom Waits.

aka Tom Waits for Norman; Norman is in Ireland.

So, eventually, there's Tom Waits.

You think there won't be, but there is, eventually.

There's a Rod Stewart cover when you're young, then there's Short Cuts where you don't really know who he is, but he's perfect, then there's hearing Mule Variations in the summer of 99 at Ed's house and even though it's tough going, you remember Hold On, that there's something to hold on to, in the car home when Bring it All Back beats Beautiful Stranger to Number 1, then there's Blackwell's, where, for that staff of rock star/writer/poets manqués Tom Waits and Tindersticks are like Dylan/Madonna/Michael Jackson and all the old hands are making you compilation tapes with knowing looks and you still don't get it and you're just too young but you think, yes, maybe, when when I'm older, maybe when I'm on a desert island, and Ed Harcourt you like and he doesn't stop talking about Tom Waits but you think that his good stuff is Buckley and it must be his tricky stuff is Tom Waits,  and then you do Somewhere a la Tom Waits at karaoke one time when you've got a cold, and it's pretty fucking good but you make the mistake of trying to repeat the trick when you haven't got a cold, and then, of course, you listen to Martha and Ol'55 and all the obvious ones, and you think, of course, this is great, if he'd only stayed obvious, but all the hard work ones are still hard work, but you're getting there, you know you're getting there, and then you look up a few online lists of the best Tom Waits songs, and amidst the obvious ones you know, there's this one at Number 1 in one of the list, Take It With Me, and you realise, with Ed Harcourt, it wasn't Tom Waits just for the tricky ones, it was for all of it, and that lovely career-starting Ed Harcourt song Whistle of a Distant Train from 2000 is just completely a sucker for this, from Mule Variations, from 99.

Take It With Me

You watch the Coen Brothers film and the thing is Tom Waits isn't a singer slash actor, he's just an actor, and then sometimes he's a singer, of sorts.

And Take It With Me is just a beautiful song. This is his voice without affectation. Even a lot of the pop/rock songs have affectation, but this one, there's no affectation. It's as lovely, straight a song as you'll hear.

There's a Tom Waits covers album in 2019 called Come on up to the House, and it's all by women, and some of the best singers, really the best, and it's beautiful and you realise how many beautiful Tom Waits songs there are, how warm and empathetic they are, and these versions sit perfectly alongside his own versions.

And now I'm all in. All the Tom Waits. All the time.