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The Heart of Saturday Night

Tom Waits

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Album Review

If Closing Time, Tom Waits' debut album, consisted of love songs set in a late-night world of bars and neon signs, its follow-up, The Heart of Saturday Night, largely dispenses with the romance in favor of poetic depictions of the same setting. On "Diamonds on My Windshield" and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night," Waits doesn't even sing, instead reciting his verse rhythmically against bass and drums like a Beat hipster. Musically, the album contains the same mixture of folk, blues, and jazz as its predecessor, with producer Bones Howe occasionally bringing in an orchestra to underscore the loping melodies. Waits' songs are sometimes sketchier in addition to being more impersonal, but "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" and "Semi Suite" are the equal of anything on Closing Time. Still, with lines such as "...the clouds are like headlines/Upon a new front page sky" and references to "a 24-hour moon" and "champagne stars," Waits' imagery is beginning to get florid, and in material this stylized, the danger of self-parody is always present.

Customer Reviews

Waits at his best

It took me a while to warm up to the music of Tom Waits. It began with this album though, one of Waits' more mellow offerings along with Closing Time. It's an album that's able to take you somewhere else - even some place you've never been but can easily imagine - a dark barroom, a rainy night, less then perfect acoustics, but youre just sitting there with a drink, soaking in the music, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

The heart of Saturday night.

This album to me is "Tom Waits". The feel , the vocal, the lyrics is truly a trip to his world. One of the first Tom Waits albums I bought and never looked back.

Biography

Born: December 07, 1949 in Pomona, CA

Genre: Rock

Years Active: '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s, '10s

In the 1970s, Tom Waits combined a lyrical focus on desperate, low-life characters with a persona that seemed to embody the same lifestyle, which he sang about in a raspy, gravelly voice. From the '80s on, his work became increasingly theatrical as he moved into acting and composing. Growing up in Southern California, Waits attracted the attention of manager Herb Cohen, who also handled Frank Zappa, and was signed by him at the beginning of the 1970s, resulting in the material later released as The...
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