15 Mar 2020

Women Sing Waits

From New Horizons, 5:00 pm on 15 March 2020

Wiliam Dart explores some of the songs of Tom Waits, but with a difference – delivered by women singers from Bette Midler and Crystal Gayle to Patty Griffin and Aimee Mann.

This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.

No captionCome on up to the House: Women Sing Waits, cover image

Photo: Dualtone Records

By 1976 the retro chic of Bette Midler channelling the Andrews sisters was fading. Some of us wanted her to move beyond boogie woogie bugle boys … and she did. We got it in Midler’s third album, Songs for the New Depression. OK, there were those who didn’t get past its opening disco shuffle through ‘Strangers in the Night’ but others were getting their first taste of songwriter Tom Waits.

Presented, what’s more, with the sort of snap and twang arrangement that pre-empted what would become Waits’ house style a few years hence.

Timbers were shivered indeed. As they were six years later when country singer Crystal Gayle appeared alongside Waits on the soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart. In a series of lazy, late-night ballads, including one languid sparring match with the man himself.

A new CD of 12 women singing the songs of Tom Waits comes with the title Come on Up to the House, with the by-line of Women sing Waits. But women have been singing Waits, as we’ve heard, for almost half a century.

Not that so many were acknowledged by name in the very first tribute album allotted to the singer back in 1995. With the title of Step Right Up, the roll call included the likes of Dave Alvin, Pete Shelley and Alex Chilton.

Women’s names were only to be found in the small print of liner note credits, as when Meriel Barham sang his ‘Jersey Girl’ with the band Pale Saints – a revelation of single-sex intimacy, set in a nervy industrial jungle.

Now ‘Jersey Girl’ comes out into the open, without any re-contextualising of her tale in an atmosphere of furtive angst.  Singing it on the new collection of Waits songs, Come on up to the House, Corinne Bailey Rae has talked of its tenderness – of it being a song that rejects any cynicism about simple love, all caught in the innocence of its Sha La La chorus.

She likes how Waits catches the rush of first love, the anticipation of seeing the lover, the inability to sleep at night and the perhaps inevitable phases of separation and reunion.

And so it’s perfectly placed into a carnival setting – so we can imagine the ride, the dizzy feeling and the thrill of finding the special one in a crowd of many.

This comes through when she sings ‘Jersey Girl’, set in a gentle chiming Brill Building ambience that seems to be drifting south across the Gulf of Mexico and performed by musicians whose names, like all the musicians on this project, are shamefully doomed to anonymity.

It was only by online investigations that I found Corinne Bailey Rae’s comments on Tom Waits’ ‘Jersey Girl’, made available when the song was pre-released as publicity for the coming album.

The force behind Come on up to the House is Warren Zanes, who may be known to old-timers as one of the member of the 1980s band, The Del Fuegos. More recently, he’s turned to writing, his best work being a monograph on Dusty Springfield’s Memphis album for Bloomsbury Books.

In 2015 he brought out the authorised biography of the late Tom Petty, which was criticised by one reviewer as rather short on quotes, turning to editorialising rather than showing us the man as he was.

And the same thing happens with Come on up to the house. The longish booklet essay, printed in what looks to me like eye-tormenting 4-point font, is all about Zane’s discovery and idolisation of Waits.

A good third of the essay takes its time moving from a discussion of his family’s propensity for alcohol to his traumatic meeting with the singer himself in 1986 – a meeting in which he discovered that the Tom Waits whom he so admired wasn’t writing like that anymore.  “He’d broken my heart with those early songs and then moved on,” Zanes lamented. “He’d abandoned the beauty I’d fallen for and I knew he was wrong.”

Enter now another male – Scott Robinson, the CEO of Dualtone Records, who, in 2018, suggested this Tom Waits project to Zanes, coaxing him with a hot-out-of-the-studio recording of ‘House Where Nobody Lives’, sung by Irish DeMent.

At this point, halfway through Warren Zanes’ booklet saga, I became more than a little incensed. Apart from the fact that DeMent’s performance was produce by Brad Jones and the singer herself, there was no identification of the musicians playing alongside her. Downbeat magazine may have admired its suffusion of pedal, but who was it, playing the instrument?

Even more importantly, what might have been the appeal of this song for Iris DeMent? We talking here of a woman whose most recent album, The Trackless Woods, set a series of poems by the Russian Anna Akhmatova. Here’s a singer who doesn’t recourse to random choice when she searches out material and inspiration.

I consoled myself by thinking that, with a number of songs on the CD being taken from Waits’ 1999 Grammy-winning album Mule Variations, someone’s at least got taste.

One of those songs, ‘Hold On’, was the choice of singer Aimee Mann, or was it? … perhaps the choosing was by Zanes.

We know from Waits himself that this was important to him, an optimistic song, showing two people in love coming together, drifting apart and then picking up the relationship again. A song written by two people in love about being in love. A song written by Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, even if there’s no mention of Brennan anywhere on the cover of Come up to the House.

It’s lucky that Aimee Mann is so compelling that you could almost put aside your winges.

While I’m a bit of a pushover for a good juicy country song, I feel uncomfortable when Alison Moorer and  Shelby Lynn take on Waits’ ‘Ol’ 55’, and fast-track it to Nashville. And, relax, there’s no point in wondering who might have been responsible for those heart-tugging studio strings.

The often thin line to be observed when Tom Waits writes is whether the singer is a distanced narrator or the character in the song.

Waits, who’s done a fair bit of screen acting, is happy to take on a character such as his Frank of Franks Wild Years but, as might be expected by someone drawn to the music theatre of Brecht and Weill, he’s equally happy to stand to the side and offer dispassionate observation.

Patty Griffin has picked up the song ‘Ruby’s Arms’ for this collection of women singing Waits, a number taken from his 1980 album, Heart Attack and Vine. And she’s spoken independently of how it makes her think of people in her family.

Griffin is known for her immense sympathy for those with alternative life styles, using her Facebook page, five years ago now, to cry out for homeless gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.

But, for me, the image of Griffin taking on the character of Waits’ railroad man is too much of a distraction, picking up her railroad boots and leather jacket and saying goodbye to Ruby’s arms. But there’s no denying just how mightily affecting this take on the song is, with her frail, quavering voice weaving in amongst a backdrop of fragile, understated strings.

At this point, I can’t help but return to Warren Zanes’ strange essay on the cover of Come on up to the House. Particularly a line in which, having been bowled over by the emotional thrust of artists such as Aimee Mann, Corinne Bailey Roe, and Patty Griffin, he states that he didn’t know whether he wanted to be their brother, son, or husband.

He’d tried to get these women to consider Waits’ more up tempo, greasy material, he tells us ... his funny stuff with the garbage-can lid snare drum, but no, they’d stood their ground and come up with music of and for the spirit.

All of which leads to Zanes hailing Tom Waits as a man of God and how he wanted to go to the church that these twelve women had created, a similar temple to what Dionne Warwick had built for Burt Bacharach or Ella Fitzgerald for the old standards.

At which point, I was determined to find a woman singer who might take me into a nightclub rather than a cathedral.

And Canadian Holly Cole does just that in her 1995 album Temptation, totally devoted to the songs of Tom Waits. She picked up a number of songs from that One from the Heart soundtrack.

I’m tempted at this point to bring in Anne Sofie von Otter making an art-song out of Waits’ ‘Broken Bicycles’ or the redoubtable post-Beat word-woman Lydia Lunch let loose on ‘Heart Attack and Vine’, but I’ll go back just 12 years to the one and only collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. The former Led Zeppelin singer and the nouveau bluegrass chanteuse and fiddler made just one CD, Raising Sand. It carried off a Grammy but there would be no sequel.

At first I thought that Plant might have taken on Tom Wait’s ‘Trampled Rose’ – a snug fit from a vocal point of view. But no, it’s given over to Krauss who makes it extraordinarily moving with her plaintive vocals against a real Waitsian strum, boom and twang from the band behind her.

And how nice it is to know from the CD booklet that Patrick Warren is in charge of toy piano, pump organ and keyboards while Marc Ribot’s are the hands on the dobro.

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'Shiver Me Timbers' (Waits) – Bette Midler
Songs For The New Depression
(Atlantic)

'Picking Up After You' (Waits) – Crystal Gayle
One From the Heart, The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
(Columbia)

'Jersey Girl' (Waits) – Pale Saints
Step Right Up: The Songs Of Tom Waits
(Manifesto)

'Jersey Girl' (Waits) – Corinne Bailey Rae
Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits
(Dualtone)

'The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)' (Waits) – Tom Waits
Small Change
(Asylum)

'House Where Nobody Lives' (Waits) – Iris DeMent
Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits
(Dualtone)

'Hold On' (Waits) – Aimee Mann
Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits
(Dualtone)

'Ol' 55' (Waits) – Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer
Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits
(Dualtone)

'Ruby's Arms' (Waits) – Patty Griffin
Come On Up To The House: Women Sing Waits
(Dualtone)

'Little Boy Blue' (Waits) – Holly Cole
Temptation
(Metro Blue)

'Trampled Rose' (Waits) – Alison Krauss and Robert Plant
Raising Sand
(Rounder)

 

Get the RNZ app

for easy access to all your favourite programmes