Scarlett Johansson’s favourite lyric of all time
Back in 2008, Scarlett Johansson had the honour of welcoming David Bowie into the studio to work with her on a cover of the Tom Waits track ‘Fannin Street’. In the aftermath, he heaped praise on her work. “Scarlett’s performances are mystical and twice cool,” he wrote on his website. He even went on to say, “She creates a mood that could have been summoned by someone like Margery Latimer [American novelist of We Are Invincible] or Jeanette Winterson [British novelist of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit].”
One element that helped her bring this ‘mood’ to life was the literary ways of Waits himself. Johansson has long-held the gravel-voiced folk star as a personal hero, and she put her all into the performance. However, when it comes to his influence, she picked out one lyric specifically to serve as the line she offered HMV as ‘My Inspiration’.
“Licorice tattoo turned a gun metal blue
Scrawled across the shoulders of a dying town”
She cited the couplet above from his 1977 Foreign Affairs track, ‘Burma-Shave’, as her favourite. This poetic opening line sets the tone for a beautifully expressive portrait of a young girl falling in love with a rebel without a cause and hitting the open road to the town of Burma Shave only to end up in a car wreck along the way.
The track had a particularly profound impact on her life. As she explained on KCRW in 2009: “The next song I have is a Tom Waits song. When I was about 12, a friend of mine and I, we would take trips. We would take driving trips with her father. We would drive to Maine or wherever from New York, but long driving trips and stuff like that. And her dad listened to all different kinds of music, a very eclectic group of different types of artists and everything, but he loved Tom Waits. Often, we would only listen to Tom Waits for hours and hours and hours while we were driving. At first, my friend and I were sort of like, ‘Oh, your Dad listens to such weird music’ or ‘My Dad’s a freak,’ kind of thing.”
“I think because Waits’ songs often – I think they really appealed to us as kids,“ the Lost in Translation star continued, “because they are beautiful stories and strange stories and the sounds can often be, I don’t know, there’s a certain big top quality to some of the songs, and then others are just really dark and spooky, and some are just beautifully melodic. We just ended up – after such a long drive and only listening to Tom Waits the whole weekend and the drive back and everything – we both were completely mad for Tom Waits, and I’ve listened to him ever since then.”
She ended by declaring: “It’s such a beautiful song, and the lyrics are so heartbreaking. It sort of reminded me of Last Picture Show kind of — it’s just got this — again, I will say, a cinematic quality to it that is just heartbreaking, and I absolutely love. And his voice is so beautiful in it. Even when I work on a film, I often listen to a lot of music, and I always go back to Tom Waits. I just love him. So I have picked ‘Burma-Shave’ to share with you today.”
The beautiful conclusion is that Waits is also a fan of Johansson’s music. As she told NME, she received a phone call from his wife, Kathleen Brennan, saying that her husband loved her album Anywhere I Lay My Head, “I could hear him grumbling in the background,” the actress joyously recalled.
