If you listen to a great record like the Grammy-winning “Bone Machine,” from 1992, the sources are varied — blues, show songs, work songs, hymns, “the whole ceremony,” as Waits puts it —
but central to what makes Waits unique as a creator of songs is how his voice has managed to incorporate all those genres, including the mariachi music his father, a high school Spanish teacher, loved, into its very texture.
I’ve wondered sometimes — since there isn’t really much record of music past the last few thousand years — if there is some deep memory of music, melodies in there
that maybe somehow re-emerge or relate to something that we know already.
A Japanese reporter asked Cohen about one of the lyrics from the new record’s title song,
“You Want It Darker,” in which Cohen sing-speaks, “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready my Lord.”
A Hebrew word that appears in the Old Testament, hineni — הנני : “Here I am” — is said by Moses
and Abraham and Isaiah when God appears to ask something of each of them.
Not all of us can afford to have days where you’re sticking up there like a flag pole all day,
but he stays in some kind of divine condition of receptiveness.” We also touched upon Leonard Cohen, who once said, “If I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often.” (“For the rest of us,” Waits said, “it appears, not only did he go there often, he got a room in the tower, and he paid in advance for a whole month.”)
We ended the call and said goodbye, but late one night an email came in from him with the following story.
“Before I make a body of music or a record or a song,” Beck said, “sometimes there’ll just
be a feeling for a number of years — something that’s just building or incubating.
But there is that moment, ‘Whoa, this could be something really special.’”
“THERE’S AN EXPRESSION in classical music,” Tom Waits told me, one Saturday night in January, when he called to talk about where music happens.