The Dusty Shelf: Tom Waits – One from the Heart
[The Dusty Shelf is a weekly column that showcases a tragically overlooked album from the music snob's library.]
Tom Waits could be the official poster boy for a column like mine, so I guess I found it a little too obvious to include one of his albums up until now. But I notice more and more that when people – particularly young, music-loving people – cite the massive influence of Tom Waits, we are talking about the loony-bin mad-hatter musician that was born on 1983’s Swordfishtrombones and went gallivanting across the limitations of music and sanity with Rain Dogs, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. But that would be ignoring a key era of the Californian’s storied career. There was a time when Waits wasn’t really that crazy. He was just a lovesick bar buffoon, a drunk and a chain smoker, and he sang love songs.
He still is and does a lot of that, but his expansive musical taste buds, while igniting a sprawling landscape of creativity, have become over stimulated to the point where they may not even notice the subtle things anymore, like a piano that has been drinking or an old Christmas card from a hooker.
Waits’ last album in this hopeless romantic-bar musician phase was 1982’s One From the Heart, a soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s film of the same name. It’s a duet album, with Waits sharing the proverbial stage with Crystal Gayle (Bette Midler, who he previously collaborated with, was not available). One From the Heart absolutely benefits from having an angelic bird like Gayle to temper Waits’ bulldog growl, and these may be the most heartfelt songs of Waits’ entire career.
The music on One from the Heart is complete jazz whimsy, from the first piano during the opening montage to the trumpet-string bass combo of “Picking Up After You” to the seductive saxophone on “Instrumental Montage: The Tango/Circus Girl”. But the key to this album is the synergy between Waits and Gayle. Their completely genuine interplay slow dances – crying eye pressed against soggy shoulder – through a crowded bar full of romance, heartbreak, sexual tension, rage, melancholy, and reminiscence.
The album’s title track, one of the great modern love songs, has Waits and Gayle engaging in a sort of psychic call-and-response as sung by two star-crossed lovers. Waits sings, “I should go out and honk the horn, it’s Independence Day/But instead, I just pour myself a drink” to which Gayle responds, from some distant place, “The shadows on the wall look like a railroad track/I wonder if he’s ever coming back”. The song maintains perfectly that desperate tension – should I stay or should I go? – primal feelings of regret and fear.
There is so much to love about this album. It is completely derivative of all romantic music that came before it, but in the best of ways. It is so caring of its topic, it takes only the best of what came before it and cuts out all the weakness. One from the Heart is the ultimate hopeless romantic album, a culmination of everything you’ve ever heard in a love song that made your eyes a bit glassy. It is a soundtrack, yes, but it’s as if Waits and Gayle are performing their own Casablanca right here, and you can see it unfold with your very eyes, if you just close them and listen.
