Tom Waits: Time

SONG: Time

WRITTEN BY: Tom Waits

PERFORMED BY: Tom Waits

APPEARS ON: Rain Dogs; Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years
 
Tom Waits has many strengths as a songwriter—as a composer, he can spin a lovely ballad as easily as a down & dirty piece of funk; from his earliest days, the instrumentation for these songs has also been consistently first-rate, including everything from a piano trio to the percussion & accordion madness of Swordfishtrombones & Bone Machine. As great as his musical gifts are, they’re matched by his verbal acumen—whether he’s telling an apparently straightforward story or spinning out a nightmarish fairy tale, his words are those of a poet & storyteller; they create a world that comes fully to life during those few minutes the song lasts—& a world that continues in our imaginations after the music stops.

As someone who’s been a Waits fan since the 1970s, it would be difficult for me to pick a favorite album. Still, I must say that I almost always welcome listening to Rain Dogs; the album seems to create a full fledged world—a world in which deformity & desperation seem normative, but where there’s also some faint hope of redemption. Perhaps no song on the album more fully captures that hope—isolated in the midst of a bleak & disturbing scene—than the beautiful ballad “Time.”

Unlike many of Waits’ works, no persona is narrating the story, nor does the story have a distinct narrative line, either explicit or by implication. What Waits does is create a narrative atmosphere, a scenario that the song’s emotions can inhabit. What we discover are moments that have emotional & imaginative coherence—the “invisible fiancee,” “the mamma’s boy” that doesn’t “know when to quit,” the razor-wielding “calendar girl.” In creating these moments, Waits creates some beautiful lines: “the rain sounds like a round of applause,” “they all pretend they're orphans and their memory's like a train/You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away” & “the boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street” are three examples of such arrestingly poetic moments.

The musical setting for “Time” is beautiful—a spare & harmonically simple ballad (especially in the verse—the chorus has more harmonic movement) carried by Waits’ gruff half-speaking baritone. This is music that speaks to the imagination & the heart.


Time

Well the smart money's on Harlow and the moon is in the street
And the shadow boys are breaking all the laws
And you're east of East Saint Louis and the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause
And Napoleon is weeping in a carnival saloon
His invisible fiancee's in the mirror
And the band is going home, it's raining hammers, it's raining nails
And it's true there's nothing left for him down here

And it's time time time, and it's time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

And they all pretend they're orphans and their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
Well she said she'd stick around until the bandages came off
But these mama's boys just don't know when to quit
And Mathilda asks the sailors "Are those dreams or are those prayers?"
So close your eyes, son, and this won't hurt a bit

Oh it's time time time, and it's time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

Well things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl
The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street
And when they're on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot
And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet
So put a candle in the window and a kiss upon his lips
As the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart
And pay the fiddler off 'til I come back again

Oh it's time time time, and it's time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time
And it's time time time, and it's time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time