Damn, this album has really come alive and hit me hard over the past couple weeks. The more I dig into it, the more I like it in both concept and execution.
Blue Valentine is certainly Tom's most realized and mature work yet.
Every single song on
Blue Valentine is a song of loss. Every character has lost something or loses something within the song, often a life. The whole ties together brilliantly with parallel themes and repeated lyrical motifs such as the colors red and blue, Christmas, and the 4th of July.
Somewhere - A ridiculously strange choice of an opener at first glance, but the whole thing serves as almost an overture (or a pre-emptive epilogue). It feels like a sincere plea of hope for the characters on this album - no matter how lost they are or how lost they become, somewhere there's a place for them. Also, being a West Side Story song, it introduces the gang elements and Romeo/Juliet personas that we're going to hear about on the rest of the album. All that said, this isn't a Tom Waits song I love
listening to and certainly not one I'll go back to as a favorite.
Red Shoes by the Drugstore - This one's got a cool beat and adds some new instrumental elements to Tom's palette, as Mosh said, but it's not a favorite of mine. We hear the story of a woman waiting by the newsstand for a man who never shows up because he either died or got arrested trying to hold up a jewelry store. It's a solid song and we see that Tom is going to be telling stories a lot here instead of making his "character" part of the story. Apparently he got very tired of his drunk character before making this album, hence why we get more third-person tales and some true emotion from him. This song is solid, but expendable.
Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis - One of the single greatest storytelling tracks in Tom's entire songbook. It's all assembled on a repetitive piano phrase with a mostly spoken melody, but it just works so damn well. The little details throughout do a great job of engrossing the listener in the tale. Here we have a woman lost in a lie writing a letter to a man she lost, trying to bluff him into believing something has changed even though they both know it never will. The line "well how do you like that" gets me chuckling a little bit every time. A classic.
Romeo Is Bleeding - We're entering gang territory now, calling back to the opener, as Tom spins the tale of a Mexican gang leader who is so cool that he even dies like a champ. It's a groovy little tune with a cool swagger and some nice lines, but the ending is a bit too long.
$29.00 - Speaking of too long, this slow blues jam is eight minutes long! I know this is a controversial song among some Waits fans, but something about that repetitive tag line hooks me every time. But I'm a sucker for any song that uses the same tag line throughout while changing the story and meaning around every verse that precedes it. Here we have a tale of a young girl who moves to LA with wide eyes and quickly gets suckered in by a local gang member/pimp/criminal of some sort. I dig it.
Wrong Side of the Road - This song really jumped up in my ratings over repeated listens. It's Tom's first foray into mystical, voodoo-style weirdness. The whole thing reads to me like a demon of some sort conjuring a spell to make a woman get lost with him. It could be just a bad guy convincing a woman to run away with him, even though he knows he's bad news, but I prefer the darker, weirder story. It opens up at the end at just the right time. Again, I really dig it.
Whistlin' Past the Graveyard - Damn this song grooves so hard. Like the previous song, Tom inhabits a demonic vibe here as a man (or creature) who actively seeks out bad luck. I love the New Orleans vibe of the horns and the plinky guitar line. We're in our second instance of Tom feeling devilish on the album, something that will definitely return in later releases.
Kentucky Avenue - Coming out of two very oddball, slightly evil pieces to possibly one of the most sincere ballads of Tom's early years. By all accounts, this song is actually a description of Tom's childhood street and some of his friends (including a buddy who grew up with polio). It feels wistful and childlike, especially in the lyrics. This seems like an outlier from the concept of the record, but I think it fits really well. After two tracks of Tom taking death and darkness as far as it can go, he pulls back the curtain and shows something he has lost: childhood innocence. The intense emotion in his voice starting from the line "I'll take the spokes from your wheelchair and a magpie's wings..." just wrecks me every time. Tom will definitely make this kind of song later with a better melodic sense, but this track still does wonders for me.
A Sweet Little Bullet From a Pretty Blue Gun - Other than Somewhere, this is easily the weakest track on the album. There's nothing wrong with it on the surface, but it's thematic territory we've already covered on the album. A young girl moves to LA with big dreams and dies (possible from suicide - which reintroduces the Juliet theme). Mostly I dislike the placement here. I think the "story" of the album has already peaked and this just feels tacked on.
Blue Valentines - Another masterpiece. The chord and melodic structure of this song would be amazing even without the spine-chilling lyrics. There's some personal interpretation left up to the listener here, but the more I read the lyrics the more I'm convinced that this song is about a man who kills his lover on Valentine's day and can never escape the memory of her or his violent actions. The "blue" is her body, cold and blue, and also his emotions. This Romeo is lost because of his own actions and, regardless of what the opener states, he will never escape it and there will never be a place for him. The sparse instrumentation just adds to the desolate, beautiful feeling.
Also voting for
San Diego Serenade,
Piano Has Been Drinking, and
Small Change.
Calling
@Deus_Adrian &
@JudasMyGuide (&
@Shadow?)!
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-725926-1156114461.jpeg.jpg)
:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-851596-1423348501-4436.jpeg.jpg)
