Songs don’t have to be long to be great. In fact, if an artist can express his deepest emotions in a minute thirty-four, it is probably a result of genius and talent rather than surrender. Billy S. did say, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Puttin' your cards in the table isn't a drawn out thing.
She’s all that I think of.
And who has more soul than Tom Waits? In less than two minutes he encapsulates everything it feels to have your heart broken, and the discomfort of wondering where she is; what heart she is breaking. He knows where she is from, but where has she gone?
She grew up on a farm there.
Tattooed in his heart, and now a dangling appendage--static and dead to the rest of his vacant spirit--Waits struggles with the notion of amputation. What does it mean to ‘abandon love?’
And yet all he can do is sit at a piano with the rest of the broken-hearted, stroking a ninety-second melody on subdued keys, and remind himself of where she is from.
He can’t live without her. He was her only boy.
He knows where she is from. He has been there many times. What was once an unnoticed pastel fleck on a map of the Midwest is now an associative. It symbolizes death of an abstract, severance of an imagined euphoria. He is well outside McHenry now. But he is nowhere near
Johnsburg, Illinois.
You can sense the strain in the singer’s voice. A wrong key is hit. He musters up the strength to mutter the name of her hometown. Wrong notes signify his defeat. He wants the song to keep playing itself; he wants the melody to run on forever. But he knows it can’t. Like everything else close to his heart, this song is
over.
Strikes a cord on the ole heart strings, Kory, and Tom... "She grew up on a farm there."
ReplyDelete"Sooner or later, for every man, there is at least one city that turns into a girl." - J.D. Salinger