Three songs for Valentine’s Day: “Blue Valentines” by Tom Waits

“Blue Valentines” is a song that Waits is particularly fond of. It is part of the album “Blue Valentine” (1978), but we also find it in the CD version of the collection “Asylum Years”. Even in 2004, twenty years after the “Swordfishtrombones” revolution, Tom told in interviews how much he liked that piece, so much so that he included it in the setlists of shows that were now far from the songwriting of the Seventies.

Until “Foreign Affairs” (1977), his music is acoustic folk-jazz that is enriched album after album with blues and rock. Thus in “Blue Valentine” – released the following year – the electric guitar gains space, often with organ, electric bass and drums played with sticks instead of brushes. This brings the sound closer to the aesthetics of New Orleans R’n’B, allowing Waits to take on the role of rocker instead of storyteller. But not in the last song on the album.

“Blue Valentines” in fact returns to the jazz sounds of the first albums, with a Blue Note sensitivity that shapes the atmosphere. The instrumentation is limited to the electric guitar of jazz player Ray Crawford, collaborator of Ahmad Jamal and Gil Evans. This choice, combined with the final placement of the song, marks a turning point in Waits’ career. Until then, the piano had been his inseparable viaticum, companion to the beat-jazz cabaret – as Barney Hoskyns christened it: “Beat verse / jazz trio” – of a chatty pianist lost in the fumes of alcohol, his Seventies entertainment.

The lyrics do not differ from the poetics of the Pomona storyteller. It is a text in the sentimental vein of his songbook, which gives dignity to the outcasts: uprooted people fleeing from dreams, visionary nomads hunted by regrets and the ghosts of failed relationships, addicted to liquor (“Drunk on the Moon”; “Invitation to the Blues”). They traverse physical places and emotional landscapes in search of happiness or oblivion. They act as a counterpoint to other characters: the abandoned ones, whose lives are marked forever.

Here are the lyrics to “Blue Valentines”

The narrator of “Blue Valentines” confesses that he needs a lot of whiskey to chase away the nightmares (“a lot of whiskey to make these nightmares go away”). He admits that the sense of guilt for the sins committed and for having abandoned his woman is indelible (“I can never wash the guilt / or get these bloodstains off my hands”), like a pebble in the shoe (“like a pebble in the shoe”). The worst day of the year is Valentine’s Day, when he feels like he’s dying (“And I die a little more on each St Valentine’s day”), tormented by remorse for not having kept his promise to write to her (“Remember that I promised I would write you…”). However, as a relentless stalker she always finds him (“And I didn’t think you’d ever find me here”) and, on February 14th, wherever he is, he receives a blue note (“She sends me blue Valentines”).

And then there’s the voice: worn, gravelly, overused. Custom manipulated for each character, emotion, song. Not just songs, in fact, but – in Tom’s words – “movies for the ears”. Nothing sounds like Tom Waits.

Tiberio Snaidero is the author of “The art of being Tom Waits” (VoloLibero)