Tom Waits, a commission.

Welcome back folks!

Something special to start the season…

Here’s my cover of Broken Bicycles, as featured on today’s edition of Every Tom Waits Song:

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And here’s the backstory:

Ray Padgett lives in Burlington, just across the border from Montreal, where I’m nearing the end of my stay. Ray writes not one, but two newsletters. I first came across Flagging Down The Double Ds like any diligent Dylan fan mining the treasures of Substack. It was only a little later, after a virtual friendship had been struck, that Ray pointed me in the direction of his second child: Every Tom Waits Song.

As it says on the tin, this newsletter is a deep dive into the Tom Waits archive — in alphabetical order no less. For this reason, after enthusiastically accepting Ray’s comission to cover a song for his newsletter, I was presented with the letter B. That’s right, a list of Tom Waits songs beginning with B. I did try to calculate how far into the future it would take to him get to M so I could cover Martha, but we were looking well into 2025… so B it was! Sesame Street is brought to you today by the letter B.

Listening through the options, ruling out the purely instrumental and the just-too-obscure-to-pull off, I was struck by a beautiful song I’d never heard before. Humming along, the melody reminded me of two very different numbers I’d performed in past lives — Leonard’s Famous Blue Raincoat and (brace yourself) Take Back Your Mink from Guys & Dolls. It also reminded me a little of the title track from my album The Onion, which I’d not sung or even thought about for a long time.

I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t normally volunteer to sing words like orphanage or skeletons. Luckily the eerie imagery is always undercut just in time, saved at the last moment by romance and hope. Much more my style. I’m also a sucker for seasonal relevance so couldn’t resist the opportunity to sing about September in September. My choice was made: Broken Bicycles. Double B.

Ray’s Broken Bicycles post is being sent out at this exact synchronised moment. Hopefully die-hard Tom Waits fans will approve of my rendition. In keeping with the Broken theme, my one-year-old broke my guitar tuner for the occasion.

If you haven’t yet pressed play, now is the time:

Let me know what you think. Or let others know what you think!

Summer is gone, but my love will remain…