Poor Edward, Tom Waits, Alice

It was only a matter of time before I wrote a post about Tom here. I’ll start small - another beautiful melody telling terrible things. Alice was a softer album, a steel guitar strummed with a velvet glove, perhaps. There’s a darkness to it, of course, but it’s a timid darkness, like an evil child that quietly asks to tell you about the cats he set on fire in the basement…

Of course, we all wish we had an imagination like Tom Waits. How does he dream up this stuff? Well, actually, this particular song isn’t quite straight out of his little brain. There was actually a real Poor Edward, as I discovered on The Human Marvels :

The story always begins the same way. Edward is said be have been heir to one of the noblest families in England. He was considered a bright and charming man, a scholar, a musician and a young man in possession of profound grace. He was said to be quite handsome when viewed from the front … yet, on the back of his head there was a second face, twisted and evil.

Wow. Art imitates life, even in Tom Waits’ world. In a way, though, this makes the song - with its perfect simplicity, the old, twisted voice, the crank organ barely making it to the next bar under the weight of all that sorrow - all the more impressive. It’s one thing to think up some crazy story to match the sounds in your head (hell, I do it all the time…), but to actually take a real story and write a song to go with it that just seems so perfectly matched.

I think this is the kind of thing that I appreciate most about Tom Waits, beyond the great sonic landscape and the darkness and the dry humor. I love the way he can use these symbols, these archetypes (the circus sideshow, the organ grinder) and make them seem so real and so part of our world. He’s really a magician in that way - anyone else could try these same ideas and they would just seem trite and old-hat, but Tom just waves his magic wand, does a soft-shoe turn, and “Abra-cadabra!”