Björn recenserade Swordfishtrombones av David Smay
None
4 stjärnor
There were places in America before Johnson's Great Society that had fallen off the map. It was beyond mere lawlessness; it was a bizarre landscape.
All of Tom Waits' albums, but especially Swordfishtrombones by virtue of being such a wild departure from what he'd done before, are set to some extent in what Greil Marcus called the Invisible Republic, the Old Weird America. A world of people and places left behind or stepped off. None of it remotely real, but all the more real because of it. That's why you can't trust anything Tom Waits will tell you, and also why the real actual facts around his life aren't nearly as interesting as the stories he tells. It's like the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays; Shakespeare is the guy who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
What I love about Smay's books is that he never tries to explain the songs, …
There were places in America before Johnson's Great Society that had fallen off the map. It was beyond mere lawlessness; it was a bizarre landscape.
All of Tom Waits' albums, but especially Swordfishtrombones by virtue of being such a wild departure from what he'd done before, are set to some extent in what Greil Marcus called the Invisible Republic, the Old Weird America. A world of people and places left behind or stepped off. None of it remotely real, but all the more real because of it. That's why you can't trust anything Tom Waits will tell you, and also why the real actual facts around his life aren't nearly as interesting as the stories he tells. It's like the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays; Shakespeare is the guy who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
What I love about Smay's books is that he never tries to explain the songs, or tell The Truth about Waits. Well, almost never. As heartwarming a story as it is, and as respectful he is, his interest in Waits & Brennan's marriage occasionally gets slightly too far into tabloid rock journalism. But for the most part he uses those weird, noisy, somehow ever-ancient songs as springboards to discuss Waits' entire career, his influences, his fellow travellers, and his methods, all the while acknowledging that he's working with a story that's a Story. In the end, all I know for sure is that Tom Waits was born in 1653 and that I need to go listen go Swordfishtrombones again.