The Darkness Within: Tom Waits names his favourite Nick Cave song
Every part of Tom Waits‘ music seems slightly off the beaten track. Although he does have the ability to make a perfect balladic melody, his natural inclination is always playing around in the filthiest parts of songwriting and seeing what he can find. Dogeared masterpieces like Rain Dogs typify this bent for the barmy.
Waits has never been afraid to get pitch black when the time called for it, and he recognised that kind of darkness when listening to Nick Cave on ‘Red Right Hand’, a seedy tale that could’ve quite easily been cut from Waits’ famed Island trilogy.
Waits and Cave aren’t that far apart, musically speaking. Sure, they both have their identifiable roles as a jaded barfly and a rock and roll vampire, respectively, but there’s usually a little bit of overlap in terms of the tone of their music and storytelling ways.
Just look at what Cave does, for instance. Yes, his stint with The Birthday Party is closer to traditional goth music than his later years, but the back half of his career was almost as much about performance as it was about the notes on the page. On records like The Boatman’s Call, there are just as many songs where Cave is acting as much as he is singing, and that’s straight out of Waits’s wheelhouse.
Ever since transitioning towards darker music in the 1980s, Waits may have seen a bit of himself in Cave when he heard songs like ‘Red Right Hand’. The tone was still as macabre as ever, but the linear storyline that runs throughout the tune feels closer to what Waits had been sculpting in the days of albums like Frank’s Wild Years.
Whereas Waits was more about taking little pieces of words to help set a scene, Cave turns himself into a modern-day Edgar Allen Poe on this track, painting a picture of going across the tracks and coming across a sinister figure that will haunt you for the rest of your days. There had been sinister Waits songs like ‘Earth Died Screaming’ on Bone Machine, but this goes beyond eerie and becomes musically disturbed.
Although Waits had been around the block much longer than Cave had, he did manage to steal a few tricks from the new kid. If you listen to the kind of music that he made after ‘Red Right Hand’, a piece like ‘What’s He Building?’ off Mule Variations is that kind of soft-spoken terror that Cave only hinted at stretched out for an entire song, with the singer not even bothering to sing and talking his way through every verse.
That was just the tip of the iceberg for Cave, though. Throughout the rest of his career up until working on his more recent work with Warren Ellis on Carnage, Cave has only allowed his knack for dark music to spread out, letting the lyrics envelop the listener rather than just hint at what might happen if they were in one of his frightening scenarios.
Or maybe Waits saw a little bit of the brand of songwriters that seemed to be slipping away in the modern age. Since some of his favourite songs came from artists like Smokey Robinson and Bob Dylan, perhaps Waits had finally found someone who was willing to leave a piece of their black heart on the pages when they were finished with a tune.
