Tom Waits’ unique theory on songwriting

(Credits: Far Out / J.B. Mondino)

Sat 2 November 2024 21:30, UK

It’s a marvel of music that it’s never the same twice: every song is a fluid piece of art, and every masterpiece you’ve ever heard might have sounded different on another day, another take, another wisp of inspiration, another millimetre of microphone placement, and so on. We’ve grown so accustomed to recorded music that we often see songs as fixed, a tangible work of art set in stone. It’s no surprise that Tom Waits, as natural a musician as anyone, sees things differently.

The gravel-voiced musician subscribes to the Hoagy Carmichael view that songs are not even really written but rather lassoed from the floating ether, like a child with a butterfly net. As Carmichael put it himself, ”And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.” Waits knows just what he means.

”My theory is the best songs have never really been recorded,” the ‘Martha’ singer poetically opines. ”We’re listening to things that made it through but there’s so many songs that have never made it because they were scared of the machine and wouldn’t allow themselves to be recorded. The trick is to get it in there, don’t hurt the song when you record it”.

His coaxing method has resulted in some of the most unique masterpieces of the pop music age, perhaps because he lets the songs be true to themselves, whatever the hell that means. ”I don’t know, music is a living thing, and so it can be,” he pauses, ”you can hurt it, you can bruise it . . . songs are strange, they’re very simple, they come quickly. If you don’t take them, they’ll move on. They’ll go to somebody else. Someone else will write it down. Don’t worry about it”.

Maybe this is why many of Bob Dylan’s best efforts were written in minutes, so fast, in fact, that he can barely remember them; he was just greedily transcribing everything that came his way, like a kid picking up pennies on a breadcrumb trail to greatness. Waits, similarly, holds inspiration as a dear and mystic thing, though he doesn’t sweat it either—if it passes you by, it passes you by, there is always another bus on the way. The trick is choosing the right bus to ride.

When Waits was starring in the Martin McDonagh film Seven Psychopaths, he witnessed the prop department present Colin Farrell with an array of pens to choose from for his character. At that moment, Waits peered over his shoulder and said, “Be careful. Each one of those pens, it’s already got a story in it. Each pen, some of them are short stories, some of them are novels, some of them are poems. Be careful.”

With such a stirringly creative view of the very substance of art, it is no surprise that he always shapes it into unique brilliance no matter what medium his operates in.

As he puts it himself, ”You know, in my early days, I was just studying the whole thing, trying to find out what I could bring to it that hadn’t been brought to it before,” he muses. “Which is really hard to do. Most American culture, we just bury things so we can dig them up again. There’s nothing new under the sun, certainly not in popular music. By its very nature, popular music is repetitive, and it’s constantly masquerading and then exposing itself again.” He may well be America’s greatest archaeologist of music, unearthing old gems from its weird old past.

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