The Musical Actor: The artist Neil Young called “indescribable”
Every generation has a handful of artists that don’t seem to come from this plain of existence. Their music might be on vinyl for everyone to hear and be celebrated the world over, but there’s always that strange energy radiating off them that makes them stand out from every single flavour of the day. Although Neil Young was more than happy not to go along with the program whenever he played any of his songs, he thought that nothing could compare to what Tom Waits could do with a piano.
Whereas most singer-songwriters got their start playing the kind of folksy tunes that would satisfy many a bar patron, Waits’s vocal delivery was already a bit of an oddity when he started. Although songs like ‘Ol 55’ were at least commercial enough to be performed by a band like the Eagles later on, it didn’t take long for Waits to learn to embrace the strangest sounds he could possibly go.
When listening to an album like Rain Dogs, half of the time it feels like you’re getting songs, and the other half almost sounds like the ramblings of a madman. Waits still knew his way around a hook, but the characters in his songs were a lot more seedy this time around, almost like he was trying to write the theme song for every barfly that never quite found its place in the world.
Young was just looking to quote his own feelings whenever he played music, but hearing Waits was both scary and inspiring to him, telling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “This man is indescribable, and I’m here to describe him. He’s sort of a performer, singer, actor, magician, spirit god, and changeling. I’ve seen him standing in a bunch of dust, and I thought I saw sparkly things coming off him”.
Out of all those titles, though, a musical actor might be the best way to describe most of Waits’s music. His lyric sheet is the script where everything originates from, and if that means twisting his voice to sound like something else, he will do whatever it takes to give the best performance, including songs where he sounds like he’s hardly even speaking English half the time.
None of these songs were meant to be chart hits by any means, but anyone who could appreciate a good story within a few minutes could hear what Waits was getting at. It might be a hard sell to get the standard pop fans into an album like Bone Machine, but hearing a song like ‘Earth Died Screaming’ is still one of the greatest existential horrors never committed to the big screen.
And it’s not like Waits hasn’t gotten his props from the major songwriters of the world. Outside of Young, Keith Richards noticed Waits’s appeal in a split second, which isn’t shocking given that Richards is probably the personification of more than a few characters in Waits’s back catalogue.
Since Young was also known for shifting his sound, some of his later work does take a few pages out of Waits’s playbook by leaning into his harsher tone of voice. That style of singing often isn’t what people necessarily want to hear, but where others see a sheet of lyrics and a melody, Waits and Young see an emotional guide for where their voices should go.
