Broken Glass Blues
what's so enthralling
about the phrase "morning glory"
or the story of the nighttime
they call 4 o'clock in the morning
i'd write this down but
all my best ideas have turned to dust
the seat next to me's empty
you can take it if you must
i'll have a whiskey sour
'cuz this water tastes like a crime
and i'd have you too
if i could just make up my mind
isn't there some music
that could liven up this scene
just a broken radio
and an old tambourine
i'll try this again
the next time it rains
when the story of a nighttime's
curled up in my brain
just one broken melody
or something i could sing
just one scrap of poetry
to get me through the day
i'll have another whiskey sour
i drank that other one too fast
'cuz this night's as mean as an alleycat
and this song's like broken glass
the sign on my forehead
reads apocalypse or bust
the seat next to me's empty
you can take it if you must
Gather 'round children, and I will tell you about the time I sat down and tried to write a Tom Waits song! I mean, that is exactly what's going on here, no? A few things:
1. I am obsessed with Tom Waits. His music makes my soul shatter into a thousand pieces and go skipping around my house. Then of course, I have to clean it all up, but it's fine.
2. I will often disappear into particular songs or albums, and need to play them on repeat indefinitely until the melodies and harmonies are fully encoded into my DNA and etched into the hardware of my brain. This has happened with The Frozen 2 soundtrack, Coheed and Cambria's The Color Before the Sun, Taylor Swift's Midnights, Joe Diffie's John Deere Green, and many more. And it happened with Tom Waits' excruciatingly beautiful 1973 album, Closing Time.
3. It's normal to emulate artists you admire... I mean, I do it all the time, and EVERYONE does it all the time. But I think this one goes a little further in that the poetic speaker is Not Me, which is unusual for one of my songs. Almost 100% of my songs are me singing about my story and my feelings. Notable exceptions include Don't Wait Up (also Tom Waits-inspired) and Dystopia (Cormac McCarthy-inspired). This song came from some parallel universe where I'm a grizzled, whiskey-soaked bar fly I guess. Because that's what Tom Waits does and when he does it it's BEAUTIFUL so I wanted to try.
4. I'm not sure what a whiskey sour is and I've never had one.